I talked my first experience with my wife having seizures in my previous post. She didn’t have any issues until the end of that year as we prepared to visit my mother-in-law in San Antonio. My wife and I had planned to travel with her brother and his wife to Little Rock, Arkansas on New Year’s Eve. We had booked a flight from there to San Antonio early on New Year’s Day.
Our bags were packed before we went to bed the last night we spent at home before the trip. We went to bed relatively early so we would be well rested for the road trip the next day. That night, my wife had seizures twice. They were not as bad as the first time but they were bad enough to wake me up. The previous seizure gave me enough experience that I didn’t freak out. At some point between the two seizures, she woke up again and went to the bathroom and I woke up then too. When she came back, she saw our luggage in the floor. She asked me what it was doing there. I told her we were going to visit her mother. She asked me if she lives in San Antonio and I replied yes. I noticed that she was about to get upset. I told her that she had a seizure that night and that whenever that happened, she had trouble remembering things for a short time. I encouraged her to go back to sleep and if she was having any trouble remembering anything the next morning, we would deal with it then. That seemed to satisfy her.
The next morning, she seemed to be doing fine. I thought she might want to go see a doctor before we went on the trip. She thought that they wouldn’t find anything different from the first time and she could just as easily go to the doctor when we got back from the trip. She wanted to see her mom so our travel plans did not change.
We drove to Little Rock that day and celebrated New Year’s Eve very early that evening. We needed to get to the airport early because of an early departure time. It didn’t bother me to get in bed early because I really had not gotten much sleep the night before. I got in the bed and was face-up, staring at the ceiling of our hotel room. I closed my eyes after a few seconds but was still awake because I don’t usually sleep on my back. It seems like it was just a couple of minutes when my wife said, “I don’t feel so good.” I’m afraid this will be a repeat of the night before. I asked if she is alright. She says “Yes, I’ve got some spaghetti and power tools.” To try and help me remember exactly what she said, I repeated her words to her asking, “Spaghetti and power tools?” She replied confidently, “Yes!” Soon I rolled over and went to sleep. We spent a week in San Antonio and my wife remembers very little about that trip. On our next visit to San Antonio, she would say things like, “We need to go to the Alamo because we’ve never been there before!” or “We need to visit the Riverwalk because we’ve never been there before!” when we did all of that on the first trip.
Her doctor put her on medication to control the seizures. She took this medicine until she got pregnant with our first child. They took her off the medication at this point because the effects of the drugs on the child were potentially more dangerous that the effects of a seizure. She remained seizure free until after our third child was just about 2 years old.
