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A Seizure Log your Doctor will Love
By Colleen Jendreas
With epilepsy, keeping track of seizures is incredibly important. Your Epileptologist will be relying heavily on the information your provide and if you provide ALL right the info, it could save you a trip to the EMU (Epilepsy Monitoring Unit). Here is how to keep a seizure log that your doctor will love …
- Date/Time
- Fairly obvious, so I won’t spend a lot of time elaborating, but even if your kiddo has very infrequent seizures, noting the time of day is important as it could indicate a sleep/exhaustion related trigger.
- Medication Dosage
- There’s an unbelievable amount of medication changes that happen when your kiddo has epilepsy, so knowing exactly how much medication your child was taking when a breakthrough happens is imperative. Go one step further and add a dosage chart to your seizure log, so you can correlate medication adjustments to breakthroughs. Your doctor will be so happy you did this, you’ll probably get a gold star and maybe some celebratory dancing if you’re at CHOC.
- The Eyes Have It
- Note what your kid’s eyes do during a seizure. Do they flutter? Dilate? Deviate hard to one side? If I had a dollar for every time I get asked this, I’d be a millionaire, anyone who knows anything about seizures wants to know how the eyes behave, because they are the gateway to the brain people! My son’s eyes go hard to the left and this information is super interesting to his epilepsy team, they are excited by the strangest things I swear.
- Body Movements
- Pay close attention to any subtle movements in the body. If you can figure out which part of the body is more impacted during a seizure, you could potentially deduce where the problems begin in the brain and identify the seizure type. My son’s left arm raises up slowly during a seizure, which looks super strange to me, but is information that really thrills his epilepsy team.
- Trigger Possibilities
- I’ve said it before and I will say it again, there are some very weird triggers in epilepsy world, so be sure to note ANYTHING unusual that could have caused your kid’s seizure threshold to lower. The common ones are missing a dose of meds (duh!), lack of sleep, and illness. But yours could literally be anything, so write down anything out of routine that happened that day.
Did Colleen’s recommendation work for you? Leave a comment below! We LOVE to hear from our readers. Do you have a story to tell? Contact us!
Mickie’s Miracles is a 501c3 non-profit foundation for the education and awareness of pediatric epilepsy. We run on the donations and support of others, so if you have some time, please consider donating to our cause. Thank you.
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