Adjustments...

Hope this finds you all doing well. I am sad to see the holiday season end, but am excited to find out what will happen in the new year!
Well, life has been quite interesting here lately. Let me start from the very beginning. Lauren has had febrile seizures since she was about a year old. These happen when she gets sick and her fever goes up so high so fast that her little brain can't handle it and she has a seizure. She has had two of these that we know of. That being said, about a month and a half ago I started noticing that Lauren was having a hard time listening and paying attention to me. She has always been slightly clumsy, but seemed even more so lately. She developed a double ear infection right around this time and she had a lot of trouble hearing us. I had to make her look right in my face to get her to understand what I was telling her. I start noticing that when I was talking to her she would get this "glazed over" look for 5-15 seconds in the middle of a conversation. I didn't pay to much attention attention, but I did mention it to Paul and told him that I thought it looked like she might be having a slight seizure or something. I had never experienced anything like this with her before. Paul did some research on " Absence Epilepsy" and it described Lauren's behaviour to a T. I started to notice that the episodes started happening more and more often. She got to the point where she was having them every 5 to 10 minutes. I think I almost had a nervous breakdown! We got her into the pediatrician and she confirmed what we thought was going on. Lauren had an EEG and a neurology appt. and the neurologist said that she definitely has Childhood Onset Absence Epilepsy (CAE). It is treatable. From what the neurologist and all of the research that we have done say is that they don't cause any brain damage and the child has no idea what is happening. They don't even remember them. Lauren couldn't describe anything to us because she didn't know she was having them. This disorder develops between the ages of 4 and 9. The earlier they start, the more likely they are to grow out of them. There is a small percentage that they can develop into gran mal seizures later in life. Anyway, the neurologist thinks that Lauren's case is pretty straight forward and that she will grow out of them. It could be ten years, but he is hopeful. She is on medication now to help control them, meaning that they should go away completely. He believes that the febrile seizures and these absence seizures are connected and that this is some sort of genetic mutation that might have just skipped generations. I am so thankful for that double ear infection! Without it we wouldn't have noticed the seizures. Thinking about the future makes us a bit nervous. It's hard not to think about the what if's. What if she doesn't grow out of the seizures? What if she can't learn to drive because of them? What if her medication has some strange side effect? If anyone is on this medication for a long period of time it can lead to depression and suicidal tendancies in teenagers. It's hard to think about, but we just have to take it one day at a time and pray that she grows out of it. Life is so exciting! Everytime we have turned a corner this year it seems that God says " I need a little bit more faith from you!" I cling to Isaiah 43:2