When Jessica was almost seven, she had a febrile convulsion, due to a viral infection. It only took two and a half minutes for the ambulance to arrive at my home. Jessica was blue, and all I could see were the whites of her eyes. By the time we arrived at the hospital she still had not come out of the seizure. The first doctor who looked at her said she would be able to go home in a little while. I said I wanted a second opinion. He got another doctor from upstairs to have another look at her. After I got the second opinion, they decided they were going to admit her to hospital.

Later she had another seizure. The doctor called to tell me. The doctor was supposed to go off duty twenty minutes after Jessica was admitted to the ward. He ended up staying with her for the rest of the night. She ended up having a third seizure, and it was a really bad one. I almost lost her. They had to triple an adult’s dose of medicine to bring her out of it. If it wasn’t for this wonderful paediatric doctor, she may not be alive today.

It did not hit me until the next day that I could have lost her completely that night. It was like a nightmare that would not go away, as it was a very hard afternoon, and a long night worrying about Jessica. She spent four nights in the hospital, to me it felt like forever.

Jessica had a reaction to the medication they were giving her, so the pediatrician had to change it to Valproate. She was on this drug for eighteen months, until she presented with the side effects of it. As I spoke to her specialist, he suggested that we slowly take her off the Valproate, and introduce Lamotrigine into her system. This took about six weeks to do, very slowly.

She was still having absence seizures, while the medication was being changed over, which were quite bad.

It is frustrating and hard to watch her go through this, and not be able to do anything for her. At times I feel like a tape recorder, as I have to repeat thing to her over and over again, after she has had a seizure.

She has had EEG’s and MRI’s done and nothing abnormal has shown on them. I recently found out that epilepsy is on my side of the family. Epilepsy has been a real eye opener for me as well as for my daughter.

One thing I have noticed is that Jessica gets tired very quickly, she also has trouble learning because of her seizures.

She has quite a few absence seizures at school. She normally tells me when she comes home from school that she has had them. I am glad she goes to a school that understands exactly what she goes through with them.

We have to watch Jessica when she gets a viral or infection, and she could have a febrile convulsion at this time with a rising fever.

Her medication has been changed three times since she was diagnosed, and it has been painful not knowing what to do or where to go. We have watched her with the medication side effects and they have not always been pretty. While she was on aborigine all she wanted to do was sleep- not only at home, but also at school. She is now on Keppra, and hopefully this medication will work for her. She still wants to sleep, but unfortunately the medication has this effect on her.

She still has seizures and we have not managed to get them under control with medication. It is absence seizures that she has all the time. I just wish I could take them away from her. Yet I know I cannot do that.

She was diagnosed with epilepsy in September, three years ago. It has been a very long and hard three years, watching her go through this alone, and not being able to understand totally what she is going through.

Unfortunately she may never grow out of the seizures.