Okay News

After almost a full week in the hospital, I was finally able to speak with Ryan's resident neurologist. Of course you would think that having a non-verbal patient would prompt a physician to contact his parents for information, but I'm not going to dwell on that little detail. I'm also not going to dwell on the fact that the only reason she called was because my attempts to communicate with the doctor yesterday didn't produce results, so I demanded that the neurologist meet my husband at the hospital this afternoon. Apparently that was enough to make her pick up the phone and dial my number. I'm not dwelling on that though.

The conversation was quick but to the point. I gave her a brief history on Ryan, the meds he's been on, his success (or lack thereof) on one of his current meds, etc. It was then decided that he needed to come off the med that is very apparently 'not working' and will go back on a previous med that 'was working.' Please understand, that he was taken off this previous med because his neurologist at the time was concerned that Ryan was having different types of seizures and this medication would actually aggravate once of those seizures. Got to love the way meds work. However, at the same time he removed him from yet another seizure med that we knew was causing some serious behavior problems. Hind-sight is 20/20 and I now wish I would have pushed for removing one med at a time. However, what he was saying made sense at that moment, so we went for it. Lesson learned.

We hope that the med change is met with great success, although at this point we'll accept good success.

Unfortunately, Ryan did have a series of seizures during the night. The gave him a loading dose of medication and was seizure free until he had a mild focal seizure this afternoon. Unfortunately, all his seizure activity landed him in ICU. Not because they consider his condition to be critical or even serious at this point, but strictly because he needed a level of monitoring that would be better served in ICU. Dave is with him now and tells me that he's doing pretty well. He's back to not eating or drinking anything, so Dave ordered him some food and was going to try to get something down him before he leaves later this evening.

Ryan will not be released from the hospital until a few things happen.

1. The seizures have to stop. That one is obvious.
2. He needs to be eating and drinking on his own.
3. He needs to be taking his meds orally.

Now we wait.

**UPDATE**
Dave was able to get Ryan to eat a good supper and take his meds orally. Yeah!!!