God is in Control

Last weekend, I noticed that Micah's face started twitching a little when he was sleeping in his swing. It just lasted about 15 seconds or so, and honestly, I thought that he was just in an active state of sleep. You know how during REM sleep, your eyes move around (thus the name "rapid eye movement", ha ha)? And sometimes babies sleep with their eyes halfway open (kinda weird looking, but it happens)? Well, that's what I thought it was at first.

A couple of days later, he did it again, but this time the mouth twitching was more pronounced. I started to get worried enough to grab my phone & record a short video of it. I figured that I'd just run it by his pediatrician at his 4 month appointment, which was only a couple of weeks out. As the week went on, it happened twice more and we started to take it more seriously. I had seizures when I was a newborn (very newly born, actually... about 1 week old) and we wanted to make sure that these little twitches weren't actually seizures. The last one occurred at about 8pm on Friday evening, so I waited until his pediatrician's office opened the next morning at 9am. I left a message stating pretty much everything I said above. As I heard myself audibly explain what was going on, I think the gravity of the situation hit me and I started crying on the voicemail. After about 15 min, the nurse called me back and told me to go straight to the ER. Not St. Vincent's ER (our hospital), but the ER at Emanuel Children's Hospital. Immediately.

Only 5 hours after I had first called his doctor's office, I was sitting across from one of the best pediatric neurologists in Oregon and she was viewing that video of Micah on my phone. Think about that for a minute. How blessed are we? Seriously. If we were in a 3rd world country, we would just have to watch our son continually have seizures and not have access to this kind of medical help. We are so, so incredibly blessed!

After an EEG, which confirmed that he most likely did have a seizure recently, she prescribed phenobarbital and he had his first dose via IV at 5:30pm. (It took 6 attempts to place the IV; a little hard for Mommy to watch, to say the least). As thankful as I am that we have this medication, if you know Gabe and I very well, you know that we take medication very, very seriously and only take it if absolutely necessary. It was really hard to give our 3 month old a medication that effects his brain. The thing about seizures, though, is that they beget more seizures. If we didn't treat it, his little developing brain would very likely continue to have more intense and frequent seizures; it would develop a repeating pattern that the brain would accept as "normal" behavior, therefore, reproducing that pattern over and over again. The medication prevents the seizures by calming that overactive brain activity and tells the brain that not having seizures is normal (instead of the brain thinking that seizures are normal).

We've actually decided to switch the medication to something more mild and which has substantially fewer side effects. The goal is to completely wean him off of medication in 6-12 months. About 50% of children grow out of seizures, of which I was part of that 50% and my seizures were more extreme and started at a younger age. We are 100% confident that God is in control and absolutely knows what's going on. He has an incredible plan for little Micah's life and our prayer is that little Micah would be a bright light shining God's power and compassion into the world.

Micah and I came home from the hospital at about 4pm on Sunday evening (Gabe cancelled his business trip and stayed home with Jada, took care of the house, visited us, and was such an amazing support to me over the weekend). We decided to go to the Sunday Night Celebration service at church that night. As we were singing, "God, You are mighty to save, mighty to save", I started crying. He is SO mighty to save. Thank you, God, for saving us.

Daddy & Jada visited Mommy & Baby Micah at the hospital

A very tired Micah... all of the poking, exams,

& EEG (notice the impressive hairdo) wore him out.

Our Room

Our Precious Boy