Last Wednesday was a day we’d been waiting for…

Let me back up.

A few weeks ago we made a visit to Mason’s neurologist for an annual ‘hey let’s touch base and see where we are” type of appointment. We really like his pedi neuro. He’s got a great bedside manner, is patient, listens to us, and seems genuinely interested in Mason and his progress.

It was during our visit that our pedi neuro asked if we had yet submitted Mason for an EEG. We hadn’t. It was his belief (and ours) that we should consider it in the near future as more research shows some seizure activity in the brain in our ASD kids.

Ironically, an EEG was on our list of items to discuss (Usually Rashele scores all the points for great questions but I get points for this one because it was one of my personal questions as I had just read about some findings surrounding it a few days before)

Score
Joey - 2
Rashele – 4,398,492

I’m catching up.

Last week when we were called we were given our appointment time of 9am and told the protocol to follow.

Mason would need to be sleep deprived….not a big hurdle. As previously noted sleep has always been an issue for him. On the night prior we let him stay up until 1115pm, far later than his usual 8:30 – 9:00pm bedtime (we slack off in the summer months somewhat). As he normally does, he woke a couple of times during the night. And at 6:30am the morning of the EEG he came into our room and crawled in bed with us. We figured we might as well make the best of it and let him stay there for a few minutes talking with him and informing him of the day’s coming events.

We started his mood off in the right direction by bribing him with maple glazed donuts and his current favorite books.

We made our way to the hospital, checked in and waited. Fortunately we didn’t have to wait long and before we knew it Mason was on the table getting prepped. The girl w/the funny blue crayon made marks on his head. Only Mason didn’t find it funny at all and he was quickly coming unglued. He had a hard time sitting still and I dreaded the thought of how hard applying the electrodes was going to be if he couldn’t handle the crayon.

The technician conducting the EEG had the same thought. So much so that she thought it best to swaddle him with a bedsheet so she could continue. Rashele wasn’t keen on it, and glared at me more than a few times. We disagreed on the swaddling. She didn’t think he needed it. I did. And as uncomfortable as he was, I didn’t want to have go thru this twice because if he had moved at the wrong time during the process that’s exactly what would’ve happened.

Over the span of 15 minutes the 30+ electrodes were applied with a tacky paste-like substance. His head wrapped like King Tut to keep them in place.

He was not pleased (hence the title of this blog entry…you get the picture)

Rashele used her magic gift of relaxing him enough to get him to sleep during the most important part of the scan while the technician punched her buttons and monitored his progress.

All in all it went well, and 2 days later we learned that everything was normal. No seizure activities were noted.

Checking that off the list.