Two nights ago I had another bad dream. It was kind of similar to the one I wrote about before. Much shorter this time and updated to be in our new car. I was driving alone in our new (used) Mercury Villager. I was doing okay but I was running just a bit late. I was coming up to an intersection on the other side of which were two separate freeway entrances: one going off to the right and one to the left. The one on the left went up a large overpass structure as it veered leftward and it was banked at a severe angle. The light at the intersection changed just as I was approaching it and slowing down. I had to accellerate and barely had time to read the signs and figure out that I needed to take the left entrance. I went up it and the bank of the overpass was too much. The van started to go over and I started plummetting in free fall. I saw the ground below spinning as the van was falling and I had time to say a prayer and will my love out to each of my daughters and my wife and then...I woke up. It was about 3:30am and I didn't sleep anymore that day.
The next day (or was it the same day) we had a follow up appointment with my daughter's neurologist. That day in the email that Mrs. Koko sent me to remind me of the appointment, she said that since surgery was no longer seemed like a reasonable option and the latest medicine wasn't working (the Felbatol made her shaky, jumpy and gave her a "weird feeling" which was a lot like a pre-cursor to her seizures) she was ready to push for the Vagus Nerve Stimulator (VNS). We arrive at the doc's office and as it is a late appointment no one else is in the waiting room and we are ushered right in by the doctor even though we were a few minutes early. As soon as we enter the room, the first words out of his mouth are "I think we should try the vagus nerve stimulator." (No, he's not one to say 'hello' or any of the other common courtesies one might expect; he's not rude necessarily as much as he is a skilled and focused professional.) Well, the wife was surprised (she thought she'd have to fight for it) and pleased. Me? I'm dubious. The data is hardly conclusive on the VNS and they still don't know why it does work when it does. It seems hardly more than a crap shoot to me. But like the doc said, it's like a lottery ticket; what have you go to lose? Well, it is a surgery being peformed on my daughter, albeit a far more minor one compared to what we had contemplated earlier this year.
Interestingly, he also told us that his partner presented my daughter's case at a national gathering of epilepsy doctors at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine. Many of the docs there suggested a something-or-other scan which would mean invasive probes and injecting a dye during and after a seizure which would have to be monitored inside a gamma scanner. They also offered that the VNS should be explored as an option. When you have the nation's top experts in the field telling you something, I guess you should listen. So, we're going to start moving along this line.
The thing is, as my wife points out: time is passing and in less than a year our daughter will be in high school and she is not learning enough. What the hell is going to happen to her in the future? She is a bright enough girl and she's turning into a real beauty (if she wasn't so shy we could probably get her jobs as a print model; she is quite thin and long-legged with nice coloring). But she has an incredibly low self-esteem and no self confidence about anything. What is to become of my precious little girl?
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