Scary morning...

Saturday, April 6

Luke and Kitty both had their first soccer game of the season at 8 in the morning.  I took Luke to his game since I help coach the team and DH took Kitty.  The rest of the kids were left at home with M&M in charge - and they were all asleep when we left.  After the games Kitty and DH went home and DH went back to bed because he wasn't feeling too great.  I stopped at the store to buy some balloons for Kay because it was her birthday.  After I got home I found all of the girls downstairs watching the older ones play video games.  I asked if MJ and Kay had eaten breakfast and the answer was "no" so I had them come up to eat.  I gave MJ and Kay some cereal and then turned away to pour them some milk into some cups.  When I turned back and glanced at MJ, she was slumped over in her chair and her whole body was twitching.  I quickly ran over to her and grabbed her and picked her head up and I could tell it was full of cheerios and she wasn't responding at all and I could tell she was having a seizure by the way her body was jerking.  I told Luke to run up and get dad and he came down and grabbed MJ and tried to figure out if she was breathing or not.  We don't think that she was and she was turning very pale so I picked up the phone and called 911.  It was a very scary few minutes before we could visibly tell that she was breathing and coming back to reality.  The paramedics finally made it to our house after she was breathing and recovering.  They thought that she felt warm even though she only had a temperature of 98...  They think that she had a febrile seizure which is one of the more common causes of seizures and is caused by a sudden spike in temperature.  I am not convinced by that diagnosis though because even though she had been sick and we had a sickness going through the family, she had been better for the last couple of days and never once felt warm to me that day.

It took MJ a couple of hours to fully recover from this episode.  I was quite nervous the whole day watching her.  She was kind of babbling a little just before the paramedics arrived, but by the time they got to the house she was whining/crying and could not be comforted for a good 20 minutes or so.  When the paramedics left I took her upstairs to change her diaper and get her dressed and she was still crying through all of that.  I picked her up and tried talking to her and asking her what was the matter.  She finally started saying, "I want ..." but then she would say something that I couldn't understand.  It took a few minutes before I finally figured it out.  She was trying to say, "I want to go with you."  She saw that I still had my jacket and shoes on from the soccer game that morning and she thought that I was going to go somewhere and she didn't want me to leave her.  (And Blondie had told me that MJ had woken her and Kay up that morning crying for me and wandering around the house asking for me.  Maybe she woke up not feeling quite right...)

This all happened right at the beginning of the morning session of General Conference so we missed the first half hour of talks.  When we made it down afterwards I just held MJ on my lap and she fell asleep in my arms.  After doing some looking on the internet I found some other things that can cause seizures that would make more sense to me: one of them is dehydration and the other one is a low blood sugar level.  Since we are not sure what happened or how she was feeling when she woke up that morning it is hard to say what caused her seizure.  One thing I am very grateful of though is that it didn't happen while the kids were home by themselves.  And I hope and pray that she will not have another one...  This was definitely not an experience that I want to have to repeat.

If anyone else sees someone go through a seizure, here are some things that I have learned:

-  There really isn't much you can do when someone is having a seizure.
-  The main thing you should do is to make sure that there is nothing around them that can hurt them while their body is seizing.
-  It usually will resolve itself in a couple of minutes.
-  A seizure is somewhat equivalent to a computer shutting down.  The brain for some reason has too many impulses sent to it all at once so it shuts down and then reboots.
-  The shaking is the body receiving and carrying out the last of the commands to the body from the brain before it shut down.
-  Usually someone having a seizure does not stop breathing.  (MJ's case may have been different because she was eating at the time.)
-  When the body is seizing, the jaw locks and you will not be able to pry it open to get food out if there is anything in there.
-  When the seizure has stopped, you should lay the person on their side.