Was It, Or Wasn't It?

Saturday night I sat with Joy on the couch, helping her brush her teeth as per our bedtime routine. Joy was very tired, drifting toward sleep. Then all of a sudden, her legs made a swift jerking motion.

Any other kid, and my first thought would be that it was the kind of jerk-awake thing that happens as sleep threatens to overtake you. But since it's Joy -- first thought was: seizure?!?

I asked JoyDad if he'd seen that jerky motion, and what it looked like to him. No, he'd been looking the other way... but that reminded him, at snacktime earlier in the day, Joy had zoned out for a few seconds. It felt somehow beyond just lost-in-thought, really seemed "not there." And he'd briefly thought: seizure?!? but then she was back and it slipped his mind until my question.

So, was it or wasn't it?

And, if it was, what was it about?

If it was, we've got several potential culprits to consider.

One thought is that she's been growing like a weed, and it's been a long time since we upped her seizure meds (no change in dose since the seizures stopped over two years ago.)

Another thought is the whole thing about the ramifications of switching between manufacturers in the use of generic epilepsy drugs. Since I wrote about the issue in July, our drugstore has switched manufacturers on that particular medication every time we have renewed that prescription. Every single $*#&% time! And we cracked open the newest bottle from the latest manufacturer just a few days ago.

Yet a third thought is the Abilify. Yes, even though I said I wasn't going to tell you, I'm telling you now. We started a couple of weeks ago and it has not gone as we hoped, which is an whole 'nother post in and of itself. But she's still on it as of this writing. More important to today's reflections is that Abilify does have a seizure-caution in the package-insert, because one person did start having seizures during the clinical trial, which could easily have been pure chance due to the population -- or not. We did get the OK to start Abilify from Joy's pediatric neurologist, who didn't think it was likely to change her seizure threshold. But Joy has proven to be unusually sensitive to Abilify in a number of ways, even at half the dose of the smallest pill.

So maybe it was. But maybe it wasn't. We didn't see anything at all seizure-ish on Sunday.

For now, we're watching and waiting. And hoping and praying.

We'd love it if you'd join us in the hope-and-pray part.

Cause and Effect

In my last reflection on Joy's brush with craniosacral therapy, I mused about doing a post on cause and effect. Here 'tis.

It strikes me that there are two sides to cause and effect when it comes to how we evaluate what's going on with Joy's health and development. One has to do with what's going awry; the other has to do with what's going right.

I'm particularly interested today in the "what's going right" side of things.

We're trying different treatments and interventions with Joy all the time, in an elusive journey toward improvement / healing / wholeness.

There's the allopathic medicine side of things, such as the combination of strong medications we've brought to bear on Joy's epilepsy. We carefully track the seizures against the dosing. Funny thing here: the three times that we've almost gotten to a month without any knock-down seizures don't seem to correlate very directly with dosage changes, and yet without the meds we'd be in big trouble. (The one time that we tried to back down the dose of one of the two meds she's currently on, the seizures increased dramatically).

There's the non-traditional medicine side of things, like we tried with the craniosacral therapy, various attempts to bring healing through correcting flows of energy and such.

Then there's the educational realm of interventions that we're tweaking all the time, between three therapists from the school district. The intensive autism therapy I should perhaps put with the medical side of things, but the day-to-day interactions have a lot in common with what we're doing with the school district and we deliberately coordinate the two.

Then there's the fact that Joy continues to grow and mature.

What a complex and fascinating endeavor, trying to facilitate (and evaluate) all this potential growth/healing!

And somewhere, woven between all of this, is faith and mystery and miracle.

Some Boggle-playing friends of mine at church had an amazing experience lately that relates to this.

Their middle-school-aged son dislocated his knee earlier this month, a painful injury. The doctor was able to manipulate the knee back into place with quite a bit of effort, but it wouldn't stay -- it was popping back out with a fingertip's worth of pressure. The family requested the prayers of the congregation as they scheduled their son for surgery.

The day of the surgery arrived, the son was prepped for the procedure and placed under anesthesia, and then... the surgery didn't happen. The surgeon reported that the knee was back in place and healing well, staying put even when he pushed at it. Nothing in the literature suggested the possibility of that course of events.

"Are you religious?" the surgeon asked the parents.

There is much about the causes & effects of healing that is beyond our knowledge. I'm continuing to learn about being open to a range of healing, however it may come.

===========

Thank you to Barbara at TherExtras for precipitating this post. I hereby submit it for inclusion in her upcoming blog-carnival on healing, scheduled for October 6.

[Additional note: the mom of the lad with the inexplicably-healed knee did give me explicit permission to post the story!]