Finally Freedom from Frustration - Portfolio

So many parents told us all about the sleep we wouldn't get as new parents. They told us of the chronic fatigue that we would experience because of the lack of sleep. I started feeling guilty, because Violet slept five to six hours just a few days after coming home from the hospital. We had heard that we were supposed to wake her up every couple hours to feed her. My brother told us to stop that right away, and that she would wake up if she was hungry. She started to sleep so much, that when people would ask, we would pretend to be sleepy and say things like, "Oh you know how it goes with newborns, I'm telling ya!" Violet was an angel baby.

Change

At about three months old, when Violet was still rolling around on the ground, or wanting to be held, she started twitching. She would bring her arms and legs out in front of her, and her eyes would open really wide. We weren't sure what was happening. We thought she was in pain, we brought her into the ER in tears, not knowing what was going on. There was something wrong with our baby girl. They thought it might be an ear infection, because the symptoms were there. Violet was prescribed some antibiotics, and we were told that we could give her infant pain medicine if they continued. We waited a few days, and the twitching didn't stop. We started looking online, describing the symptoms and found some videos of other infants doing the same thing. We went to our pediatrician, and he confirmed that it was something neurological, and referred us to a psychologist, if you could call him that, who was in the next city over.

Frustration

Just about the only thing useful this guy did was to prescribe some medicine. This medicine worked for a few months, but then her spasms started up again. The "doctor" was did not answer our phone calls, sat on his computer, in front of us, for much of our appointments, and was always hesitant with what he said to us; almost like he wasn't sure what to do.

Freedom

We decided to get a second opinion, but had to get a recommendation from Violet's pediatrician first, which was easy. This was the best decision we had made since we decided to have Violet. He was  a specialized pediatric neurologist! He was always really positive, very approachable, knew exactly what he was doing, very confident - and we LOVED the facilities, in fact, it was in the MRI waiting room that Violet really started to walk! It felt like a miracle.

The doctor told us it wasn't infantile spasms, and that there wasn't any visible physical cause for the seizures. He prescribed Topamax, and a week later the seizures stopped - not a single one since. The stress was finally going away, the seizures were in the past, the worries finally subsiding. Relieved that our angel could live her life to the fullest.