Video EEG!

Super Owen waiting to get his EEG leads

Super Sidekick Brenna had to test Owen's cape

We checked Owen in for his EEG Wednesday morning. Our neurologist wanted to see how his brainwaves were handling the recent medication reduction.

We had to check in at 8:00am and Owen usually gets his first meal at 9:00, so once we got him all settled in our room, it was time for breakfast. Owen has had pizza for breakfast every morning for the last 3 weeks.

All ready to start

Then the EEG technician came in and started the hour and a half  long process of attaching his leads.

They start by measuring his head and making red X marks at all the attachment points. Owen thinks this part is pretty funny.

Then they start gluing on the leads. This part is a little more tedious and the adhesive STINKS! First they have to clean the spot, then they hook up the lead and apply a glue coated gauze strip over it, finally they use a little drying tool to harden the glue. Owen really likes the dryer, for some reason. It must feel good.

I guess the whole thing was pretty relaxing or incredibly boring, since Owen fell asleep about halfway through.

Once all the leads are attached, they wrap his head in gauze and top everything off with a stocking cap. Then they hook everything up to the monitors and start filming.

After that comes the hard part, keeping Owen occupied in bed (he can move around a little, but needs to stay in camera and cord range) without undoing his headgear for 24 hours.

He painted pictures, including a picture of Barkley, Grandma's service dog.

He was able to sit by the window where we (we meaning Owen, his two Skylanders, his stuffed bug, and I) played Eye Spy for about three hours. Unfortunately, I became bored with that game long before Owen did. It might have had something to do with the fact that Owen, the Ding Ding guy, the Boing Boing guy, and Bug each got two turns for every one turn I got.

The scratch on his face was from falling out of the hotel bed the night before

Rod stayed at the hotel with Brenna, Morgan, and Duncan, so they could come visit. Since we live about 3 hours from the hospital, the little kids (except for Brenna) hadn't been able to visit any of the other times. Morgan and Duncan have a lot of anxiety issues about Owen being in the hospital and Mom and Dad being gone, so we thought that coming along this time might help.

The last two times we were at Swedish, Owen had cute patterned pillowcases on his bed that he got to bring home with him. This time he had this beautiful quilt instead! Only being Owen, he was upset about not having a pillowcase, so they gave him one of those too! They even found some more for the other kids.

The stocking cap didn't make it the whole time

Owen wanted me to sleep on the pull out bed next to him, but around 2:30 AM, I woke up and realized that he wasn't in his bed. I put my glasses on quickly and found him standing on the far side of his bed with his cap off, his leads disconnected, the pulse ox monitor on the floor, and two of the EEG leads loose. I guess he woke up and couldn't find me, so he decided to get himself out of bed and look for me. For some reason, none of the alarms went off, so I had to call the nurses in to hook everything back up. I spent the rest of the night in bed with Owen so we wouldn't have a repeat.

The next morning, they came in and used a special solvent to remove the glue and special soap to remove the solvent. It will take a few days for everything to come out of his hair though.

Unfortunately, Owen is allergic to plastics and adhesives, so this is what he looks like after only 24 hours of being taped up. There were only a few places where the skin was broken this time at least. After his 6 day EEG, he had oozing, bleeding sores all over. His hair has never grown back all the way in a couple of spots.

Riding the car around the ward while we packed up

It's been about 5 weeks since we started weaning  Owen's Onfi dose. Rod and I had noticed some troubling issues and were getting worried that the med wean wasn't going well. Owen has been doing a lot more of his "twitching" at night and he's having a lot of coordination issues again. The results of the scans were pretty much what we were afraid of. There were no seizures, but he had a lot of abnormal spike/wave discharge activity. So, we will be going back up on the Onfi and changing his Ketogenic ratio from 3:1 to 3.5:1. We are pretty sure that the seizure activity was under control with the diet AND the medications, but we're trying to see if upping the diet will enable us to start eliminating medications. At this point, I'm perfectly happy with seizure control any way we can achieve it. The long term goal is still to get seizure control with the diet alone and changing ratio might help with that. We'll be going in for another EEG in about 3 months and make more decisions based on how that one looks.

First Egg!

I got my first quail egg! It's so cute. Now I just need about 70 more and we can eat them for dinner.

This is a picture of my banty/standard breed mixed eggs next to the quail egg and an extra-large store bought egg. Unfortunately, I do have to buy eggs in the Winter especially since Owen eats about 2 dozen a week all by himself now that he's on the Ketogenic Diet. I've read that it takes about 5 quail eggs to equal one chicken egg. So, if we eat 14 eggs for one meal ( using store bought or the larger of our homegrown ones, we do get bigger ones than the ones in the picture, I just didn't have any when I took the photo) that means we would need 70 quail eggs! Usually, we eat mixed eggs. Banty's, standards, duck, and now quail all mixed together. The kids love having little tiny eggs of their very own though.

Now, I can't wait for the geese to start laying! Won't that be a fun bunch of mixed eggs.

You know you have a son with neurological issues if you can no longer spell egg, because it keeps coming out EEG!

Owen Update and Beads of Courage!

Owen received his latest Beads of Courage today! Just in time for his hospital admission. Beads of Courage had a challenge to make your beads into a shamrock shape and this is what we came up with. Unfortunately, you had to be one of the first 150 people to turn everything in to get a special St. Patrick's Day bead and we didn't quite make it, but Owen had fun anyway.

He got to thread his new beads today including the special one from the Valentine's day challenge. I think these pictures do a much better job than I can of telling how special these beads are to him. We'll be taking his beads and his Tiny Superhero cape to the hospital with us for his EEG on Wednesday.

We check into the hospital at 8:00 AM, so we are actually heading down to Seattle tonight and staying overnight at a hotel. Lack of sleep is a huge seizure trigger for Owen so we don't like to wake him any earlier than absolutely necessary.
I won't be able to update the blog while we're in the hospital, but I will be able to send a few updates to Facebook via my Kindle. Otherwise you'll have to wait until we get home to find out how it went. Wish us luck!

A Special Project!

I've been working on a very special project for a friend of Devon's. She found a beautiful vintage lace dress at a consignment store. It just had a few little problems like the way the lace at the front neckline was mitered or actually mutilated and a horrible chiffon ruffle around the neck. Devon and I assured her that we could get the dress in perfect condition.

I

So, I took the dress apart and eliminated the nasty ruffle and then left the dress sitting in my sewing room for a few months.

Since the event she was planning on wearing the dress for is rapidly approaching, I finally got to work and put it all back together last weekend. Here is the newly mitered (still un-ironed) lace.

Finally! It's all put back together, with a few alterations, a couple of repairs, and without the offending chiffon! Sorry, I didn't think to take before pictures, but trust me the chiffon wasn't pretty. I'm not sure how vintage the dress was for someone to think that was attractive, but it's all fixed up now.

Leprechaun Trap

Morgan and Duncan built this Leprechaun trap today. Someone, I don't know who, but I will have words with them when I find out, told them that Leprechauns will give you candy and coins on St. Patrick's Day if you can catch them.
We have never done much of anything for St. Patrick's Day. I'm not one of those cool Moms who always makes green pancakes for the holiday or who always has the perfect craft for all of the minor holidays. So, I have absolutely no idea where the kids got the idea that the Leprechaun would be bringing them stuff. I carefully warned them  that to my knowledge we've never had goodies dropped off by a Leprechaun before and I really wasn't expecting that to change, but the trap is still on the table. I hope they're not too horribly disappointed in the morning.

Quail

This was my project for the day. What exactly is this, you might ask? It is my quail/ worm housing that will go under my rabbit cages. We had bunnies already when we moved out here into the country. When we lived in town, our bunnies had 3 tiered stacking cages in a little shed in the back yard (don't worry, they also had a play pen for outdoor exercise). When we moved here and had so much more space, we switched to hanging cages under an overhang on the garage. I switched to hanging cages because I planned to put worm bins under the rabbit cages. Worms are perfect under rabbits (with a little management) because they turn all the waste rabbits generate into lovely compost. Rabbits not only create the usual animal waste, but they are incredibly messy with their food and hay. So anyway, Owen came along and a whole bunch of our homestead plans got put on hold while we dealt with medical issues. This year, I decided that the worm bins were going to be one of my biggest priorities. I'm tired of all that nice manure going to waste because of the rocks under our cages and I hate cleaning up the drop pans.

Where do quail come into the picture? Well each year I've tired to add one new thing to our system and this year, I was considering quail. The eggs are great, they don't eat a lot, and they can be eaten themselves. Yes, It takes a lot of them, but they are small and fit into small spaces. While I was looking up more information about putting worms under rabbits as it had been a few years since I had done much research, I found THIS and it seemed like the perfect way to add one more level to our system. My rabbit set up isn't the same as theirs and my climate isn't the same either, so I decided to make the quail/ worm cages a complete unit that can be moved inside the greenhouse or garage during the winter and go under the rabbit cages when the weather is more hospitable.

First, I drilled some drainage holes in the heavy duty plastic bins I found, as too much rabbit urine isn't good for the worms. Brenna didn't actually help with the drilling, she just tested the structural integrity of the boxes afterward. Then, I built cages to fit on top. The bins I found already had holes around the top that I used to secure the cages on. Right now they are just hooked on with cable ties until I get a chance to go to the hardware store WITHOUT 4 children in tow to look at the various types of hardware that could be used and come up with something better. Once the worms are safely ensconced, I won't need to access the bottom of the bins more than every few months, so I can just cut the cable ties and use new ones.

Small doors in the top of the cages gives me access to the quail, so I can feed them and collect eggs. Right now, I am using regular chicken waterers, but an automatic watering system is in the planning stages.

I have the parts for 2 more of these bins, I just wasn't able to finish them all today.
 Right now, we have 10 quail, Coturnix and Texas A&M varieties. They are close to laying age, so we should start getting eggs soon. The 4 brown Coturnix quail are probably all girls and I'm pretty sure one of the white ones is a girl. I'm also pretty sure that one of the white ones is a boy (It's hard to tell with the white ones) based on behavior and the fact that he does a really cute crowing imitation. I call it an imitation because it isn't like a rooster crow, but it is a totally different sound than the others have been making. I don't know yet if the others are boys or girls, I'm guessing we have at least one more boy based on the fact that we had some fighting going on until I separated some of them out. I only have one making the crowing sound right now though, so maybe the others are all just girls and we were having a little cat fight.

Once I'm pretty sure I have the moisture content right, I'll be adding the compost worms. They will eat up all the waste and keep smells down as well as giving us wonderful compost for our garden.