Yesterday, Adrian shared his experience from his first few seizures. Today, I will share directly from my personal journal what that experience was like for me, his wife. And just to give you a heads up, we both fell down those nights.
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| Thankful that Adrian spent the first week of January 2014 building a snowman with his daughters and not in the ER! |
My Journal - Thursday, January 14, 2010
Happy New Year...or is it? We've been to the ER twice & to more doctors than we have ever personally seen.
It actually started the day after Christmas when Ade had a crazy incident that we thought was "sleep walking." It happened when he was napping in the afternoon and I was at work, so it was quite mysterious.
He was very sore and disoriented that week but didn't know what to make of it. Then on New Year's night we went for a drive and he got coffee with caffeine by accident, so he didn't sleep much that night.
At 5 a.m. I woke up alone in bed, then I got up to see where he was. I heard him sobbing across the house and found him sitting on the edge of the guest bed with his head in his hands. He barely responded when I talked to him. Then...in the darkness I saw blood splattered on the comforter and primarily on the pillow.
Immediately I feared the worst and ran across the hall to check on Adria. Thankfully, she was sleeping soundly in her crib.
I went back in to hold my husband as he slumped to the floor and cried. He was in such a confused, bewildered state and I couldn't see where the blood came from.
He kept crying and so did I.
Eventually I helped him get to our bedroom and he opened his mouth in front of the bathroom mirror. That's when I really lost it. A huge gash gaped on the right side of his tongue - the source of the blood. I dropped to the floor, feeling immediately faint.
I knew I needed to call for help, so I found my cell phone and called his parents. Then I was overcome with a sick to my stomach feeling and knew it was coming. So I laid on our bed and passed out. (I have a history of fainting easily.)
Meanwhile, Adrian came more aware and talked (well not really cause his tongue) to his parents when they arrived.
When I came to we decided to bring him to the ER, after a call to his Aunt Linda made us realize he likely had a seizure.
In the hospital, they confirmed that was most likely the case but a CT Scan and blood tests showed nothing to indicate why. Plus, a seizure most likely is what happened the week before.
Adrian was in a lot of pain due to the muscle exertion and still felt disoriented, but he was sent home with some prescriptions at 10 a.m. I stayed home from work with him that day. He could barely move due to the pain and not eat b/c his tongue wound.
The week was full of doctor's appointments but little improvement with Ade's pain and few answers to the cause of this. He felt like he was in a fog, depressed at times, and completely at a loss for what was happening.
Then it happened again. I saw it this time.
Around 1:30 a.m. on Friday, I awoke to find my husband shaking violently in the bed beside me. I was scared to the point of nearly fainting again as I watched him convulse and blood leak out of his mouth. Feeling helpless, I tried calling his parents and started feeling desperate as they didn't answer and I felt consciousness slipping. I called my Mom and she answered right away and came over.
While waiting for her, Adrian stopped seizing but went into a bizarre semi-conscious state. He moved around the bed in strange motions, stood up and walked then sat back down, cried and looked me in the eye with a terrifying distant, empty stare.
My mom arrived first and soon after, Leona and his parents arrived. His first recollection of this entire incident is of sitting on our bed with the 5 of us staring at him (wondering what to do). Before long Mike, Ade and I were on our way to the hospital again. Mom and Gini stayed home with Adria, who slept through it all.
This time the pain in his arms and shoulders was excrutiating. In the ER, he began to yell and cry out in horrible pain that even high dosage pain meds couldn't touch. It broke my heart to see him in such agony.
That was the end of my journal entry for that day, but the story continues. That's how the seizures started. Can you imagine that happening? Completely out of the blue they came. No warning. No signs. No known causes. And just like that, our lives had changed again.
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