Seizure

Saturday night I got a call from my dad at about 10pm.

My first thought was: oh shit.

I mean, 10 at night – it’s a little late for my dad to just call to say hello. Nighttime phone calls scare me.

He told me that my mom had had a seizure. I guess at about 7pm, she grabbed her chest and just looked like she was in pain. He asked her if she was hurting, and she said yes, and she kept grabbing her head, and her chest, and just looking horrible.

He called the nurse over, and told her something was wrong with my mom. The nurse agreed. (She’s been with my mom for a few nights over the last week, so she knows what normal looks like. This was not normal.) The nurse called the charge nurse, and the doctor. The charge nurse came, and the doctor called – neither were convinced that something was wrong. Even as my mom is sitting, in pain, unable to do anything about it. They didn’t believe it. Maybe because she couldn’t scream.

My dad thought she might be having another stroke. He said she looked almost the same as when the stroke happened. I can’t imagine how scary that must have been – reliving the worst moment of your life.

The doctor and the charge nurse finally started to think things weren’t normal, and agreed to run some tests, and to do a CT scan, to make sure there wasn’t any more brain bleeding. By the time she came back from the CT scan, she was asleep, but my dad woke her up to see if she was still in pain, and she said she felt better.

The CT scan didn’t show anything, so the doctor decided that it was probably a seizure, which only shows on a CT scan for a little bit of time, and then goes away. There was no more bleeding (thank goodness).

The next day she was feeling a whole lot better. Still tired, but that probably was more from a full week of therapy, rather than the seizure. They increased her anti-seizure medication, too, so hopefully that will keep her from having another one.

I just wish there were no more surprises. I really hoped that during these weeks of therapy, everything would at least be stable, without having to worry about the cancer or anything else for a little while. But I guess things aren’t as stable and predictable and controllable as I was hoping for.