As soon as this headache subsides, I'm taking the kids and we're going to the Chinese restaurant. There's nothing left to eat in this house, and I'm just too tired to deal with it.
Woke up at my usual 4:55 AM in order to begin getting ready for school. The weather had been "iffy", with about a foot of snow the night before, but Des Moines had already called off school twice this week for ice, so I really didn't expect that they'd call off another day. I listened to the radio and watched the news, but nothing. I scraped the frozen precip from my windshield and, after several attempts and nearly getting stuck a couple of times, headed off for school. The main roads were okay, but no side streets had been plowed at all. My school is on a main road, thank goodness, so I didn't worry. When I was nearly there, the radio announcer said glibly, "Oh, by the way -- Des Moines Public Schools are cancelled." He didn't even repeat it! I couldn't be certain that that's what he had said, so I drove around the school campus... of course, there weren't any cars or classrooms lit up, so that was my first clue, but I still couldn't be absolutely certain. Then the radio FINALLY repeated it, and I began to drive BACK home. It was too cold and too snowy to be out at that hour of the morning for absolutely no reason whatsoever. GRR! But I was glad I was going to be able to get back into my warm bed for a couple more hours.
Rick couldn't go back to sleep, so I bargained with him -- I'd take Alice to her 1:00 appointment for an EEG, and he could catch some extra sleep then (he doesn't get home until well after midnight on a normal night, but last night he'd been nearly an hour trying to negotiate his way home in the snow, then he'd spent quite a while shoveling. He was truly sleep-deprived! He agreed, so I went back to bed... yippeee! I love to sleep in. If it were up to me, I'd probably stay up 'til two or three o'clock in the morning and sleep 'til noon every day.
Alice (my 9 year old daughter) has been experiencing some weird muscle spasms on her weak cerebral-palsy side, beginning last Sunday, so we have been working all week to get a neurologist appointment and an MRI. They also wanted to do an EEG, which they did today. The MRI is tomorrow morning.
The neuro was quite shocked at her EEG, and frankly, so was I. Apparently she is having almost continual seizures, but they're partial seizures and don't necessarily "show" like the general ones do. She's having the MRI tomorrow, but according to the one she had about a year ago, it shows some indication of something called "migrational disorder". Basically what this means is that, when she was developing in the womb, some of her neurons didn't migrate to their proper place on the outer surface of the brain, but instead got lost on the way somewhere, or went to the wrong place, or stopped in the middle somewhere, and now they're misfiring and wreaking havoc in her brain.
Right now it appears it's only happening on the right side, which is the side which appears to have been most damaged (she suffered an injury of some kind when she was probably 11 months old, before we adopted her, which caused significant damage to her brain).
Anyway, she has to begin taking anti-seizure medication (Trileptal). Just one more thing on the list of her "issues"! But she is the sweetest, most compliant little girl and never complains. I'm grateful for her.
Now I'm absolutely beat -- spending all day at the hospital, as many of you can attest to, tends to drain you of all your reserves. I'm too tired to cook anything, and there isn't anything TO cook. So we're going to our favorite Chinese restaurant. And I think my headache has subsided enough now, so off we go.
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