It turns out that if you spend 9 months growing a baby with Oreos (along with the requisite veggies, fruits and grains of course!), even if you significantly reduce your Oreo intake for the following 6 months, you will not be able to then jump on an elliptical and resume your previous 45 minute routine. In fact, after 4 minutes, you will probably have a near death experience. Just a random observation for today.

Soooo picking up from yesterday, the seizures began around 5 or 6. We hadn’t seen him for several hours because of both the regular newborn checkup and the cardiac one. It was actually reaching a point of, “Where is my baby?” frustration. And let me say, care at Northside Hospital is excellent. Communication between floors and departments…not so much. When we started trying to locate him, nobody could find him. We were told to call this nursery, then that and he’d always already been moved. I was told to ask my nurse.  She didn’t know either. This went on for a bit, and then I heard it. Chris was downstairs trying unsuccessfully to locate him as the alarm went off alerting the floor that a baby had been taken past the boundaries. Chris couldn’t get the elevator because they were on lockdown, and then he heard a security guard mumbling into a walkie talkie, saying something that certainly alluded to a baby being missing. This was the last straw that lead to Chris’s very loud and public demand to know where Connor was. And this is when they located him and informed us of the seizures. (The alarm was a staff member accidentally passing the boundary and would happen a couple more times while we were there. No missing babies!)

I wish I had written about this at the time because the emotions are hard to recapture 6 months later. But I could barely talk out loud about it for a couple months. But as scary as it was, we were still in the mindset of, okay, they’ll get these meds going and he’ll be home in a few more days. Well, a few more days stretched into 5 long weeks as the seizures were incredibly resistant to the medication, a hallmark of TSC. He started on phenabarbitol, then Keppra was added, and by the time he left he was on Dilantin as well. But he was still having an extraordinary number of seizures a day. At least 80 a day, maybe more. Many of them were subclinical which means only an EEG can detect it. They don’t cause the outward jerking. At this point it looked like we were gonna have to go on the surgery, so he was transferred across the street to Scottish Rite. I could have carried him over, yet it involved a $1500 ambulance transfer. Thank God for insurance.

We met with his potential surgeon Dr. Chern at Scottish Rite. At this point we were finally miraculously seeing some improvement with the meds. He was still having a number of seizures, mostly subclinical, but it was decided that the benefits of waiting to do the surgery when he was bigger outweighed the cons. It would be safer in a few months. So after 5 weeks of driving to the hospital every day, he was finally released on April 23, 2012. And I have to say my husband got me through this. He was a rock. He had his moments, but I would have lost my mind without him. Just the simple fact of having a sick child is scary enough, but on top of that it shattered that “it can’t happen to me” belief that gets many of us through life. I’m a worrier by nature. Takeoff makes me nervous and the word cancer makes my stomach turn. And yet I still fly and could improve some health habits. Now for the first time, I truly realized that anything can happen to anyone at anytime. My plane could crash. I could actually get cancer. Fortunately we had so many other family and friends there to support us through all this. So thank you to all of you.

Connor’s official diagnosis wouldn’t come for several weeks. That’s the genetic test confirming his TSC, but from the rhabdomyoma in the heart, and the seizures, tuberous sclerosis was the immediate thought. He subsequently had an MRI for his brain, a kidney ultrasound, and an eye exam as those are areas most commonly affected. Thank God his kidneys and eyes were clear. But clearly the brain wouldn’t be. The tubers, including the one that would be surgically removed were evident. For my next entry I will get into the specifics of what TSC is.

Breastfeeding never worked out with all that was going on, so I pumped for the next 3 months until I couldn’t take being attached to the machine anymore. But it may have been for the best considering I had to carefully time my glasses of wine around pumping. Otherwise I probably would have knocked out a bottle on a nightly basis. When I tried going online for advice, I was shocked by how harsh and nasty a lot of the hardcore breastfeeding community is. It left me with a lot of guilt when I finally quit, but I had to for my mental state. It also left me disappointed that there was yet one more way in which women can be extremely unsupportive of other women. It’s easy to judge when everything goes hunky dory according to plan, isn’t it? I still have hostility about it. But women need to know that it’s extremely common to have problems with latching, pain, lactation failure, and many other things. So NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg can stick it where the sun don’t shine.