My oldest son came to be ours when he was three years old, he had been in foster care for a year before him and his brother joined our family. When he came home we knew there would be an adjustment time for him especially because he is the oldest. He barely knew us and we barely knew him, yet here we are a brand new family.
We noticed that he would start staring off and we thought it was just him being a normal toddler, spacing out and ignoring his parents. We never realized that this zoning out could be something more serious until one day when my sister in law, who happens to be a special ed teacher, asked if we ever had him tested for epilepsy.
Why would she ask about him having epilepsy? He was not having seizures like you see on t.v. or in the movies, so why would she think he should be tested? She went on to tell us that there is one type of seizures called absence seizures or petit mal seizures. We had never heard of this and she went on to explain that some people have these seizures where they zone in and out for short periods of times and do not know what happened for the time they were having the seizure.
We made an appointment for the pediatrician the very next day who thought we were being paranoid new parents and she did not see the purpose of testing him for this. Me being me, I insisted on the EEG test to be done just to rule it out. I mean if there is a possibility that he had epilepsy I wanted to know. The pediatrician finally agreed and sent us to a pediatric neurologist.
If you are a new parent getting referred to a neurologist for your kids is scary, even if you are the one that insisted that you get referred. Filling out all the paperwork on a child, who you do not know the biological families history on is rather hard.
The neurologist trusted us and more important my sister in law’s judgment and referred us to the EEG testing. He wanted to do what is called a sleep deprived EEG. A sleep deprived EEG consist of keeping the child awake all night, they can only sleep no more than 2 hours, no caffeine, no sugar just a loving adult poking and trying to keep the child awake. Lots of fun for the parents of a three year old, but it does provide the best testing for an epilepsy diagnosis.
The doctor set up the appointment and then booked us for one immediately after the test with him to get the results.