Sunday, December 20, 2009

Febrile Seizures. . . . NO FUN!

Yesterday morning I had the scare of my life. Ella had a slight runny nose Thursday and Friday but no other symptoms of sickness. Then around 7:30 Friday evening, she was hit with a pretty high fever. We gave her advil and put her to bed. By 1:00 AM she was up with a high temp. More medicine and fitful sleep until 6:30 AM, Saturday morning. She was really lethargic and wouldn't eat anything so I decided to wait on another dose of advil to spare her tummy. But I noticed she was quickly heating up and decided to give it to her anyway. (Heath was gone already for the morning.) Within a minute, she started gagging and I thought she had vomited and was choking on it. I picked her up to try and get the vomit out and immediately realized she was in a seizure. Her eyes were in the back of her head, she was convulsing all over and biting her lip. I ran to the phone and had enough wits to call 911 (barely)!

It's a great thing those 911 dispatchers are trained for panicking people like me! As Elianna turned blue in the face and her lips turned purple, my hysteria reached its height! The dispatcher professionally talked me through the seizure and about a minute and a half after it began, it stopped. She slowly caught her breath, unclenched her jaw and immediately fell asleep.

The ambulance came, got her cooled down and took us to the ER where they ran typical tests to find the source of any infection that may have caused the fever. They were certain the seizure was simply due to her spike in temperature. If you have a young child, I highly recommend reading up on febrile seizures. If I would've known she was going to live, I may not have panicked so much!! They did find the beginning of a bladder infection and the beginning of pneumonia. I was really shocked since she had no symptoms but very grateful they found it as early as they did.

Full of antibiotics and a few hours later and we were back at home with an almost normal 2 year old! As Abiel was recounting the event to our friend who picked the other 3 up when I was in the ambulance, she asked, "Is that normal?" My friend began to share that febrile seizures are quite common and Abiel interrupted with, "No, I mean mom screaming into the phone that her daughter is turning purple?!" To that, my friend calmly answered, "Well, when your baby is turning purple, it is absolutely normal for a mom to scream into the phone!" So, just in case you are ever screaming into the phone during a panicky situation . . . it's normal! :-)

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