EEG Rock Star

Will's EEG was this morning, bright and early. The doctor moved it up from the middle of the month so we could have a better idea of what was going on with Will sooner. We were happy not to wait any longer.

Will was as patient as could be expected as the technician was attaching the EEG electrodes to his head. He certainly didn't enjoy himself and could barely be soothed by the typical means (even the Wheels on the Bus wasn't working... that's bad!).

Once all of the electrodes were attached securely, the tech began the EEG. Will was pretty patient during the test, which lasted about 20 minutes. He watched the Weather Channel - he apparently likes the voice of the guy who does the 'Local on the 8's' much better than the voice of Stephanie Abrams. Whenever she would speak, he would get agitated. Glad I'm not the only one...

Will even did well when they placed a strobe light in front of his face and blinked it at varying speeds. Honestly, at one point I felt like we were at a rave because of the strobe action in the room. The only thing missing was the heavy bass music and glow-sticks.

A couple of hours after the EEG, I received a call from Will's neurologist. He indicated that Will had almost constant vertex and central spikes on the right side of his brain, which were clustered around the area of the brain that controls the face (this makes sense if you read back to the description of what happened two Sundays ago). This is also the area of Will's brain that had the most damage from his brain hemorrhage shortly after birth (and also causes his cerebral palsy).

The neurologist kept calling the EEG results 'interesting,' which I still don't know how to interpret. However, the net of his call was to say that based on the EEG spikes, it is most probable that what Will experienced was a partial complex seizure. There is no way of knowing if Will has had a seizure before or predicting if he'll have one again.

Once a person has had a single seizure, the probability of them having another one is 30-40%. Once a person has had two seizures, the probability of them having another one jumps to about 80% and the person is officially diagnosed with epilepsy.

Because we only know of a single seizure at this time, our official orders are to watch Will and see if he has another seizure. We're also going to keep the MRI appointment for later this month to determine if that reveals anything new. If Will has another seizure, then he will go on anti-seizure medication to control any further seizure activity.

So while this wasn't necessarily news that we were happy to receive, there is some comfort in knowing what occurred. We're getting pretty good at this 'wait and see' thing...