Samuel's EEG Adventure

Well, Samuel and I survived the EEG adventure, and what an adventure it was! We braved rush-hour traffic into Washington D.C. Wednesday morning. My driving directions told me to turn the wrong way up a one-way street, which further delayed our arrival. Finally, we arrived, parked the car and entered the building. I got some funny looks at the desk on the second floor when I told them I was looking for "surgery." That was because I was at the wrong hospital! How was I to know that Washington National Medical Center and Children's National Medical Center were both at the same location!? Getting to the correct building entailed another quarter mile walk, where we then encountered lots of construction!

Samuel endured the EEG quite well. He was put under general anesthesia to get the leads "glued" on to his head. The leads were then covered by a gauzy kind of cap, and the wires were covered so that it looked like he had a long stocking cap on. He came out of anesthesia in the recovery area to the sounds of the starting theme song of "Max and Ruby." (Before he woke up he stirred a bit when "Wow Wow Wubbzy" commercials came on) He likes this show, but sometimes he cannot tolerate startings and endings. He weakly attempted a yell, "Turn the TV off!" Problem was, I couldn't, it was the TV in the recovery area of the little girl next to us!

To make a long story short, from the recovery area we were led to another floor to the room we would stay for the rest of that day and into the next. He was to be hooked up for about 23 hours. He had a few spells of impatience ("I don't want to be electronic!" he would yell from time to time), but I was able to help him calm down by talking and doing some gentle sensory activities. We were on the west side of the building where we had nice views of the National Cathedral and the Washington Monument. We could see the high-rises in Arlington off in the distance. We had a terrific view of a brilliant orange sunset that evening! It was a pretty day, much like the kind of day 9/11 had been, and I thought about how folks in the hospital would have been able to see the smoke coming up from the Pentagon that day.

A big help that evening.was the large screen TV on the wall on which he could watch TV, surf the internet, and load movies. I was even able to e-mail a few people during our stay, a very nice feature! Samuel was in electronics nirvana that evening as he loaded up his favorite production company logos (he wasn't much interested in watching the movies themselves)... TriStar, Columbia, Paramount. He did this over, and over, and over. He also spent some time on the PBS Kids website and Nick Jr. We turned the TV off at 10pm to "go to sleep." Ha! He was too excited to sleep! We spent the next few hours shifting around various sleeping locations in the room. Much later, perhaps after midnight, I let him turn the TV on again and he was thrilled to find a "sign off" screen for WHUT (a PBS station in Washington). We "watched" that for a good 20 minutes before I suggested he turn it off and we try to sleep again! He fell asleep some time after 2am!

The purpose of his EEG was to monitor for mini-seizures. We do not suspect he is having seizures, but since he has spells of inattention, his neurologist wanted to do this procedure to rule them out as a cause. I will be able to call her office later this week for the results.

DC photo borrowed from Flickr, photo taken by Matti Mattila.