...and this too shall pass...right?

Christmas day!

Yesterday morning - still not as colourful as it would get.

Later that morning - it's starting to settle in under her eyes. Still very swollen.

And this was taken tonight. Uncle Sean said she had "Irish sunglasses" on.......sigh.

Okay, so poor ole Lolly would like a do-over of the past few days. We couldn't agree more. Her drop seizures progressed to the point where she was having close to 40 per day - absolutely ridiculous, considering she was seizure free for a year. We finally took her into emerg after she took a huge fall on the hardwood floors and well, you can see for herself how pitiful the end result is. Liam can't even bring himself to look at her, and he cried pretty hard when the bump first came out. Poor guy. What we found out at emerg is that I am smarter than some neurologists. No really! Our neuro is out of town (of course - it is the week between Christmas and New Year's) and the on-call neuro suggested (over the phone) doubling her dose of Keppra. Initially he wanted to put her back on Trileptal, but I immediately refused - so their plan b (after much rumination/discussion) was to hit her hard with the Keppra. Since her drop seizures have coincided with the Keppra that our neuro increased on December 15, I think it's safe to assume that it may be having an adverse affect on Lola. So we left no further ahead, but at least we found out her bonk to the noggin was nothing more serious.

Last night was horrible. Truly horrible. Lola had cluster seizures, and rages lasting what seemed like hours. She cried and screamed when she wasn't seizing - and being overtired increases seizures, so...yeah. That's how it went. This morning we put a call into the on-call neuro again, and he agreed with me - lowering the Keppra dosage as I'd already started doing. Let's pray for a better night tonight. Today she had 15 seizures, which is about half of what she had the day before. They weren't as severe (overall), but still completely unnecessary. It was hard for us to explain to the ER people that this isn't "normal" for Lola. Yes, she has a brain injury. Yes, she has epilepsy. But we haven't seen a seizure since she first got sick last November! Her last seizure was November 24, 2008 - believe me. I remember.

Anyway, we're still getting things figured out, and we're in a bit of a holding pattern until our neuro returns. We have an appt to see her on Wed, Jan 6. Seems like a long time away given our past few weeks, but what can we do. I hesitate to show these pics, but I want to keep track of how bad things were on this med so that we aren't convinced to stay the course. sigh.