When you have kids whether you have them biologically or you adopt them like we did, you hope that they can live a wonderful, strong, productive lives. When your child has a medical condition, your dreams for them get a little less clear.
When our kids were placed with us our oldest was three and as far as we knew they were a healthy set of boys who only needed a family to love. It was not too long after we welcomed them into our hearts and family that we noticed our oldest son was zoning out quite frequently. We had never thought much about it, we figured it was just him adjusting to us and being a normal toddler. We did not know any better, these were our first kids and they did not come with a manual.
One day when my sister in law (who is a special ed teacher) was over she noticed him staring off and asked if we ever had him tested for epilepsy. Why would we have had him tested we never saw him having a seizure? Doesn’t epilepsy include seizures that would be obvious when he fell on the floor shaking? This is what I always thought epilepsy was not just zoning out. I did decide to have him checked out just to be sure.
Our pediatrician kind of blew us off and thought we were being overly cautious first time parents. We did insist that he have an EEG to see if there was anything to worry about. Good thing I followed my newly arrived mothers instinct. It did turn out that our sweet little boy was having seizures the whole time we had him and we just did not know it. Shortly after the EEG was done we were referred to a pediatric neurologist and our journey through life with a child with epilepsy began.