The Rough Week Continues
Maria’s seizures are getting worse. She’s regularly having about a dozen a day and one was almost a minute, which is MUCH longer than they usually are. She’s been cranky and I’m pretty sure a lot of that is because of the seizure activity.
They weighed her at the doctors - and she’s still 30 pounds! I just don’t believe it. She is noticeably chunkier and the weight gain would explain the increase seizure activity, so we are baffled.
The are doing blood tests to check her drug levels before increasing her regular medication. In the meantime she’s getting her emergency Clonazepam about every other day. We (especially her daddy) just hate that stuff since it turns her into a zombie, but it definitely shuts the seizures down fast.
Unfortunately, the ONE person in the city who can draw blood from Maria has left her pediatrician’s office. Since most people just torture her for 5-10 minutes, digging around with the needle hoping to get lucky, and because blood draws are a big seizure trigger because of this, we were very unhappy. However the new guy took his time and got it the first time so maybe he’ll work out.
And because we don’t have enough problems, Maria got a bad bite from her kitty this week. We know how patient Kijana is with her so Maria must have been severely torturing her to have triggered that. As most of you know, Cathy and Manolis have an uneasy truce over the cat. He hates cats, convinced they are all vicious and disease ridden like the feral cats on Crete. He barely tolerates Kijana out of respect for Cathy. This has not helped the situation, especially since the bite is getting infected.
So as long as they were at the doctor, they got someone to look at the bite. They gave her a tetanus shot and antibiotics and it should be OK.
Good news though! Someone from Shriners called after reading the article and has offered to pay for the stander. Although we certainly feel the DDD should pay for it, I think we’ll take the bird in the hand rather than continue to fight.
There will be a follow up article on all of this. We’ve had lots of people offer to donate money for the stander, including one guy who offered to pay the first $1000! We are going to ask the columnist to mention that their money would be better off going to Shriners or some organization like that to help families more in need than we are.