OH MY GOSH, I HAVEN'T SEEN YOU IN LIKE FOREVER!

So, I’m only about a month late with this post. But, hey. Who’s counting?

Here’s what’s been going on in our world:

Almost every day for about a year now Grace has been having headaches. Once every three weeks or so they progress into migraines. Here’s the clincher: she also had two seizures.

Probably the scariest thing I’ve ever witnessed was Grace having a seizure. I would venture to guess it is the scariest thing Grace has ever experienced as well. After she came out of her second one, she looked up at me and her very first words were, “Did I die?” I can’t even type that without crying. It was terrifying.

She had to undergo some testing. Possible causes were: diabetes, brain tumor, epilepsy… Needless to say, I’ve been anxious. We began to get good news. All of her blood work came back normal. That ruled out diabetes. Her MRI came back normal. That ruled out a brain tumor. A few weeks ago, she had to have an EEG.

I received an instruction packet in the mail. In order for the EEG to be accurate she had to be 24 hours sleep deprived. Yep, you guessed it. That means I had to be 24 hours sleep deprived as well.

I pulled all-nighters in college plenty of times; cramming for tests or hanging with friends until the sun came up. Caffeine is an old, dear friend of mine. So I figured the staying up would be fairly easy for me. I was mostly worried about driving to the neurologist’s office after being up all night. Grace has never been up all night in her life. C’mon! What kind of a mother do you think I am? So, I knew this would be a big challenge, especially since she couldn’t have caffeine to help her. I began to think of what we could do that would be stimulating enough to keep her awake all night. We started off by heading to Wal-Mart around 11:00 pm and stayed there until almost 1:30 in the morning. If I had a dime for every “I can’t believe you have your child out this late on a school night” look I received, you’d probably never hear from me again because I’d be living somewhere in the Pacific on my own private island. Grace was fading fast by the time we headed home, so we made a quick trip to Whataburger (thank goodness for 24-hour fast food joints) to fuel up for the long night ahead. I knew movies would have the same effect as sleeping pills, so I decided to let Grace play computer games for several hours. It stimulated her and kept her attention until 4:30. At that point, we were both really simpled out. Everything was hilarious. We literally laughed at something (obviously not funny enough to remember) for 15 minutes non-stop. Every time we would quit laughing we would look at each other and it would start all over again. Whew! After we recovered from our busted guts, we went upstairs, showered, got ready, and headed to IHOP for more fuel. Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey!

Her appointment was at 8:00 am, so at 7:00 we headed downtown to the doctor’s office. I couldn’t keep her awake any longer. We were pulling out of the IHOP parking lot and in my rear view mirror I saw her: head back, mouth hanging open, drooling, snoring. Poor baby. She was done.

The EEG technician and the neurologist were awesome; very friendly, reassuring and thorough. I was super impressed. Miraculously, I stayed awake and alert so that I could soak up everything they told me about what was going on with Grace.

So, the diagnosis is: chronic multifactoral headaches. Wha…? Basically, anything that is slightly out of whack with her body will trigger a headache. She’s hungry: headache. Tired: headache. Hot: headache. Reading too long: headache. And if the symptoms persist without relief, a migraine is very likely. This may or may not be related to her seizures, but there is no real explanation for them yet.

Her neurologist gave us a list of nine preventative things to begin to incorporate into her lifestyle to counteract the headaches. (This list is from my 28-hour sleep deprived memory. Told you it was a miracle.)

#1) Drink water. Lot’s of water. Constant water. If she gets thirsty, she’s not doing a good enough job.

#2) No food dye. Eating red food dye is like taking a headache pill.

#3) No caffeine. Ever.

#4) Chocolate only once a week.

#5) A daily dose of Centrum Kids multivitamins. Moms, he said this is the best thing you can give your child daily.

#6) Green vegetables every day.

#7) Fruit every day.

#8) At least 9 hours of sleep every night.

#9) Yoga. YOGA? Yeah, yoga. Okay, then. Yoga.

Some of these things we were already doing. Okay, actually we were doing one very regularly. Grace usually sleeps at least 10 hours every night. We’ve been doing the rest of these things daily (minus the yoga) every day since then. It’s been 19 days. She’s had two headaches. This is an amazing change of pace and Grace is feeling so much better these days… but maybe we still need to do the yoga.

One of the headaches happened Friday night because she had the flu and her fever shot up to almost 104. That’ll give anyone a headache from Hades. Accompanying this lovely flu, was laryngitis.

She’s much better today and seems to be back to her normal, energetic, fun self.

I, on the other hand, am sick as a dog today. Tag, Mom! You’re it.

And so it goes….