The next month, it happened again. So, this time I knew it wasn't right...Ken and I took Charles to Children's Hospital, Emergency Department. There, they did his first EEG - they put 27 dots with a black sharpie all over his head, then they glued 27 wires to his head and wrapped him up like an "Avatar" - remember the long cone-like thing coming out of their heads in the movie? It was aweful. I was so scared for him. That's where we first met our Neurologist, Dr. Meredith Schultz. We really liked her. In addition, because she was a resident, she was accompanied by the most senior-level Neuro Doc in the whole hospital, Dr. ?? He was the best at reading EEGs. After much review in the hall and not in front of us, they came in together and told us that Charles was having seizures - albeit small ones - they were diagnosing it as "Benign Infantile Myoclonus" (described below). They were perplexed by his EEG recordings, as they had only seen them like a few times in their career. And, hence we start the life of "mystery"...Dr. Schultz has said on numerous occasions since then, that "Charles worries me." - he's a mystery to the Neuro docs, and as you will see in subsequent posts he continues his mysterious seizure disorder.
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Benign myoclonus of early infancy is a paroxysmal phenomenon of the first 2 years of life which occurs in neurologically healthy infants during wakefulness, and is usually triggered by excitement or frustration. The phenomenon is characterized by a shudder-type, paroxysmal motor manifestation involving mainly the trunk and sometimes the head, associated with tonic limb contractions of variable intensity, from hardly noticeable to more sustained. The clinical manifestation should not be confused with the spasms of epileptic infantile spasms syndrome, or with tonic reflex seizures of early infancy. Although the phenomenon is already widely known, its polygraphic recording is rarely reported in literature.
