Interesting Morning

As you may have gathered from Tina's comment on the blog yesterday, after she "warmed up"... she "cooled down" and didn't have any seizures. Her folks headed out in the early evening and Tina and I just hung out in her room killing time until we went to bed. Tina wasn't feeling all that sleepy and the nurses had to change her IV (not a pleasant experience - Tina has had so many IVs in her arms that they just look like one big bruise) so she stayed up until they were done getting it in, but when she tried to fall asleep her stomach wasn't feeling very well and her mind was racing and she just didn't sleep well.

The neurologist told us yesterday that he wanted to do some "mapping" of Tina's electrodes today so when her nurse came in this morning at 8:00 I asked her what time she thought they would start this mapping. She asked the EEG tech who said around 8:30. So we got up a bit earlier than we normally would have, especially after Tina's poor night's sleep. I ducked into the bathroom to get cleaned up before the neurologist showed up, but when I came out he was already there and getting ready to start the mapping.

Mapping is the process in which they go in and stimulate Tina's electrodes one at a time with a fairly high voltage and observe what kind of effect it might have on her. The idea is that they want to clinically verify what the part of the brain under each electrode is responsible for so that when they finally remove the part of her brain that is causing the seizures they have a good idea what else they might be effecting. So they stimulate the electrodes one at a time and then ask Tina if she feels anything or if they can observe any changes. For instance she might start to feel a bit warm, her fingers might start to tingle a bit, or her lip might quiver. They might have her read out loud and see if her speech starts to slur and so on.

So we had a whirlwind morning of it before they plugged Tina into the 480 (not really) to see what would happen. So it was that, as I was still folding my cot up this morning, they flipped the switch on the very first of the electrodes on the surface of her brain. I had asked the neurologist what Tina should expect to feel when they were doing this, and he said that they really were still in the process of setting up and that the first few electrodes that they stimulated should have no effect whatsoever. However, immediately after they flipped the very first switch, Tina sat straight up in bed and said, "that did something. Where's my button - I'm having deja vu." within 5 seconds she was having a grand mal seizure.

It was a rather strong seizure this time, but she eventually came out of it without needing Ativan. As is typical, Tina was unconscious for a half hour or so and then slept for most of the rest of the morning. The neurologist was going to review the data they collected from this seizure and try to analyze what happened. As of now we're not sure what bearing this seizure may or may not have on Tina's impending surgery. I'll post more when we know more.

Tina's folks have come back to the hospital and we're all hanging out now watching TV... well actually they're watching TV and I'm writing on the blog. The neurologist mentioned before he left that they may consider coming back later today and continue with the mapping. Given our recent experience with the whole mapping process we're not real excited about this, but hopefully he was able to learn something and can make the necessary adjustments to make it a bit less... well... exciting.