Deja Vu All Over Again

Last night was another eventful night.  Tina ended up having another 4 seizures between 1:00am and 10:00am.  They had put her back on a low dose of her anti-seizure meds the night before so the good thing was that these seizures didn't progress into a grand mal which made them much easier to treat.  They came on, lasted for a couple of minutes, and went away on their own.  At the same time it still makes for a long night when everyone comes flying in, whips on lights, and start asking questions out of a dead sleep.  Then it's hard to come off from the adrenaline rush and get back to sleep.  We ended up sleeping until around 9:00 when nurses started coming in to do their normal assessments.

Late morning was the big moment of truth when the head neurologist made his rounds.  Unfortunately the news wasn't good.  They had analyzed all 7 seizures that Tina had and it did appear that all 7 were coming from the same exact location, the problem is that the location was not where the electrodes are, it's someplace else.  What that means is that they implanted the electrodes in an area of her brain where the seizures are NOT coming from.  In the words of Yogi Berra- it felt like deja vu all over again. 

I was waiting for him to say that they needed to do another surgery to move the electrodes to the new likely location, but that wasn't what we heard.  Instead he said that based on all of the previous seizures that Tina had when we were here in 2010 along with these seizures he's now completely "stumped" as to what to do next.  We asked if moving electrodes would be an option.  He said that it would be if he knew where to move them to.

He said this is the first time in his entire practice that he's ever seen something like what has happened with Tina.  In a nut shell they've chased Tina's seizure focus in a circle and are basically back where they started and don't know which way to go.  He still feels that Tina's seizure focus is very focused and if it could be found it is still very likely that it could be removed with little risk and high likelihood of success.  However, at this point, to place electrodes anywhere else in her brain would basically be a shot in the dark.  It would be a random placement with no idea if they were even close to the right place.  The risk is too high to just roll the dice like that.

What all this means is that as of tonight Tina is scheduled to go back in for surgery on Wednesday to have all of the electrodes taken out of her head, have her skull replaced, and we will likely be headed home either Friday or Saturday -  for all practical purposes, in the same boat we came down here in. 

They will be presenting Tina's case to a review conference later in the week, and depending on what insight comes out of that, there may still be a possibility that they would suggest some other options, but the head neurologist doesn't hold out much hope that this will happen.

Once again Tina and I are faced with a reality that is not what we had in mind when we decided to come back down here to Cleveland.  We had so hoped that this would be the beginning of the end for this journey that we've been on for the past 5 years, but it doesn't appear that it will go that way.  As you can imagine we are both disappointed and are reeling to a certain degree from this news and are still coming to grips with what it means for our future.   Tina's emotions are mixed - one one hand she's disappointed at the news we got today, but on the other hand she's happy to know that we'll be headed home much earlier than the 5 weeks we sat here the last time.

Please continue to pray for us as we work through these latest developments, pray for the upcoming surgery, and pray that God would continue to receive all the glory due him.