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Lorianna is 10 years old and epileptic.  She had her first seizure a few days before she turned 3 years old. It was a complete shock to us and we didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know anything about seizures and even though I had heard the term epileptic, I really didn’t understand it very well. It turns out there were a lot of things I didn’t know about in the beginning.

I didn’t know that there were different types of seizures. When someone thinks about seizures, they immediately think about a person dropping to the floor and their whole body shaking. As it turns out, that is only one type of seizure. There are seizures that just affect one part of the body, there are some that just make you do spacey. There are seizures where you are fully aware of everything around you and seizures where you pass out. There are drop seizures, where just just fall down. There are febrile seizures, which are brought on by a high fever. Lorianna’s first noticeable seizure was a febrile seizure. I say noticeable, because thinking back, we think she may have been having seizures before this, but we didn’t recognize them. This was a whole new world for us.

Does this mean she’s not able to do the things other children do?  No, however it does mean that we have to take extra precautions when she is away from home.  We always have to be aware of what’s going on, because she could go into a seizure at any time.  She has different types of seizures, some where she just goes spacey for a few seconds, some where she falls down and some where she passes out and then her body stiffens and starts shaking.
Her doctors made a determination that she is medication resistant.  This means that she has been on multiple medications, but none of them have controlled her seizures.  So recently she had a surgical procedure to put in a Vagus Nerve Stimulator or VNS.  This is a device that goes into the chest and sends electrical impulses to her brain.  The pulses “reset” the brain to help stop the seizures.  It also has a magnet to break seizures that break through.  So far, for Lorianna, the VNS has been an amazing success.  She is still having some seizures, but the intensity and duration has been greatly reduced and her recovery time is cut in half.  I will continue to write about her journey here.  Next is Meeting Epilepsy For the First Time and Diagnosis Trouble