The photo above is me with my beautiful, 23 year-old, daughter, Kelly. She has suffered every day of her entire life, struggling under the pain of severe epilepsy, Cerebral Palsy, mental and physical retardation, etc, etc, etc. She now functions at the level of a 6-month-old baby.
In 1997, Kelly was 6 years old. She had been born with one side of her brain “under-developed”. It eventually “caught up.” However, she was extremely developmentally delayed and regularly had screaming fits. But she was also a very happy, smiling, and loving child most of the time. She smiled a lot and was very affectionate.
We saw a talk-show about a similar child, and we took her to the Pfeiffer clinic, trying to figure out why she had screaming fits. They gave her large portions of vitamin supplements to attempt to correct a chemical imbalance. We don’t really know if that would have changed anything or not because shortly after she started taking the supplements she began to do the classic “sit-and-stare” thing typical of pediatric epilepsy patients, and get red blotchy spots on her face at the same time.
Honestly, looking back on it, we think she had already been occassionally doing this at almost unnoticeable levels.
When we brought up her symptoms to the clinic, the nurse told us that it sounded like she was having seizures and we should take her to a neurologist for an evaluation.
We did that and discovered that she was having absence seizures.
