Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Troubling news

Alex had an appointment with a neurologist at CHEO and it turns out that there is something going on in that little brain. Alex has always been prone to "tuning out" periodically, which we've chalked up to the autism or even just thinking. However, there is a chance that what we've been seeing is in fact something called "absence seizures" where the brain simply stops talking to the body for a brief period. However, they can't say for certain because he fought the EEG so much that most of the scan ended up simply being noise. They did see enough to say that there is something unusual going on though.

The plan now is to try a sleep-deprived EEG, which is where we keep Alex up the night before in the hopes that he'll fall asleep with the apparatus on so that we don't get any movement problems. If that doesn't work, they would need to move to an MRI, which would require a general anesthetic. They don't seem to be in a hurry to book the next EEG, which I'm taking as a good sign of lack of concern.

We'll keep everyone posted as we know more.

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