Journal entry by Barbara Bradley — Nov 16, 2010

For those of you that don’t know, Katie was admitted to Duke Hospital last night. The weekend showed no sign of improvement with 20 seizures a day. The plan was to just have bloodwork drawn Monday afternoon to get another phenobarbital level to see if we could increase it. However, around 2 pm she started having seizures every 10 minutes or so while awake and then she didn’t want to wake up.

So, here we are again. They increased her phenobarbital quite a bit and she was sedated heavily last night and this morning. Dr. Mikati came to see us this morning and we are trying this first. If it doesn’t work, there are a couple other tricks up his sleeve. If they don’t work, emergency surgery is an option. Although I am at my breaking point, I don’t want this to be an emergency situation. Her best chance of success is to get her stable and let the depakote get out of her system completely.

My hope is to get her stable this week and get back home. We bought tickets to fly home to spend Thanksgiving with family. We knew it was a gamble but we figured if we wanted to go we better go before surgery.

So…we wait… Last night she had 8 which is better than 20 but she also had 8 this morning. I guess tonight and tomorrow will give us a better idea if this will work.

Thank you for the prayers and support.