Wednesday Night in the E.R.

Last night we went to a party at a farm.  It was promising to be a really fun night, with tons of delicious looking food to eat (lobster!) and good friends to talk to.  My five year old daughter Ruby was off playing with one of her friends and my wife and I enjoyed some grown-up conversation as we waited for the dinner to be ready.  I noticed, as I did one of my parental “glance over at the kids,” that Ruby was laying on the ground, and this did not concern me.  Kids are always doing weird stuff.  After another a minute I re-glanced and saw that she was still there, laying flat on her back, with her friend standing over her.  Was this normal?  Were they playing a game?  Why wasn’t she moving?  I mentioned this to my wife, who decided to go over and check on them, and then called me over right away, saying that everything was not all right at all.

I sprinted over to Ruby, still on the ground now four or five minutes later, and tried to get her attention, but she was completely unresponsive.  Her eyes were rolling around in her head and her pupils were as big as saucers.  I picked her up in my arms and started racing towards the car, as she slowly became slightly more responsive.  She was very confused and asked where we were, and said that her head hurt.  She could not tell me what day of the week it was, or the month.  I was completely freaking out.  She has epilepsy, I knew that, but we had never seen anything like this.  Her previous seizures lasted at most maybe 30 seconds, and with her medication we hadn’t seen even a small one in almost 2 years.  And we still had no idea why she had been on the ground, if she had fallen, if there was a head injury, or really anything at all except that something was wrong with our daughter and we were going to the emergency room.

By the time we got to the hospital she was slowly coming back into herself.  She could answer questions, but was very tired, and she had no memory of being at the farm at all.  In fact, she started crying because she wanted to go to the party and didn’t realize that she had already been.  The E.R. looked pretty quiet to me, so I was hopeful that we could get in and out in a reasonable amount of time, but they told us that they were all full up and we would have to wait for a room.  Everyone was hungry by this time, so we got some Skittles out of the vending machine and gobbled them up while the kids played with the toys that were strewn about the waiting area.

When they called our name, we were ushered into a room, but the wait for the doctor was even longer than the wait for the room.  I tried to distract the kids by spinning a penny on the floor, which admittedly kept them fascinated for quite some time, and when they lost interest in that, we watched Handy Manny on our phones.  By this time Ruby seemed quite back to normal, except for wondering why we were there and couldn’t we go home now?  I was a little more relaxed too, now that my daughter seemed to be herself again, but that feeling of overall dread and sickness was not going away.  As horrible and selfish as it was, I felt that something terrible had been done to me, and why had this happened to me?  It was like I had somehow been wounded, only I couldn’t tell you where, and I couldn’t tell anyone about it, because I couldn’t explain it myself, and I felt guilty enough for even having these feelings in the first place when it was clearly my child that was suffering.

The doctor finally arrived and checked her out for a possible head injury, but found nothing.  In fact, he could find nothing wrong with her at all.  This ruled out a concussion, and it led us to the theory that she must have just lay down on the ground herself, although no one saw her do it.  She hadn’t fallen, and everything was back to normal, but this guy was an E.R. doc, not a neurologist.  He couldn’t tell us what we really wanted to know, which was, of course, would this happen again?  He did call the neurologist on call that evening, and they said that this incident was neither surprising, nor unsurprising.  That it could happen again, or it could not.  Maybe it was an isolated incident, or perhaps a sign of things to come.  But what everyone agreed on was that this was a seizure, and the longest, scariest, out-of-the-bluiest seizure Ruby had ever had.

By the time we left the hospital it was after 9, and we still hadn’t eaten dinner.  We let Ruby choose what to eat, which meant the McDonald’s drive through on the way home.  As we sat at our kitchen table eating what passed for our dinner, my wife just looked at me and said, “I can’t believe we are eating McDonald’s instead of lobster.”  Preach it, sister.

We let Ruby sleep in today, and then I had to take her to school and make the rounds of describing the incident to all of her teachers, the nurse, and anybody else who might be watching her today.  She’s off in the world again where I can’t protect her, and it seems scarier than ever.  Hopefully we will talk to her neurologist soon and figure some more stuff out, but until then I guess I’ll just worry and pray.