Miracle
Miracles, do they really happen? My opinion? Oh YES they sure do happen. We’ve experienced a miracle. The miracle is our daughter.
We were overjoyed at the arrival of our second daughter in January 1995, 2 years and 3 months after our first beautiful daughter was born. She was a beautiful baby, with a head full of black hair and proclain skin, but she cried so much it was pitiful, although it seemed she was ok. When she was 11 months old she had her first seizure; out of the blue she fell to the floor and began turning blue then black, her little body contracting. I was certain she was going to die. She didn’t. After she came out of the seizure she slept and slept and slept, I thought she would never wake up anymore. She had several more terrifying seizures before we were sent to a neurologist by our family doctor. After extensive testing, the neurologist diagnosed our little darling girl with epilepsy. This meant she would need to take medications for years to come… which we were more than willing to do. The neurologist prescribed her anti-seizure medications which we started to give her immediately. We blindly trusted the neurologist to know what he was doing; he WAS a professional after all. We were so very wrong for placing our total trust in this doctor.
Our daughter began showing strange symptoms not many months after beginning her medication. I read and reread the pamphlet that came with her medication and according to my calculations her prescribed dose was too high for her little body but I didn’t dare play around with the dosage. She hadn’t learned to walk long ago yet but some days she looked just like a little drunkard the way she walked. Her gums became quite swollen and her hair began falling out by handfuls. Every time we visited the neurologist I would mention my suspicions that these symptoms were coming from the medication; he denied it every time, said it was impossible. So we continued giving her the medication. This went on for about 1 year and 3 months. Then came the day when our daughter stopped walking, stopped sitting on her own, almost completely stopped talking, her gums were so swollen no teeth could be seen and her beautiful hair had almost completely fallen out. Pitiful, horrible, unfathomable what had become of our baby. She was kept in the hospital and for the very first time a blood test was done, at the order of our family doctor and not the neurologist, to see what level of medications she had in her body. The results were shocking and proved that the suspicions I had had all along were true; her levels where more than double the therapeutic range that was allowed, which meant they were highly toxic. We had unknowingly intoxicated our baby…..poisoning her; very hard to forgive oneself of something like that. We prayed hard, our family prayed hard, our friends prayed hard and we believed that somehow God would answer our prayers, and He did. God preformed nothing less than a miracle on our daughter. Within a week of reducing her medications to the correct level she was back on her feet, sitting on her own, walking as if she had never stopped walking, starting her cute chit chatting again. Our family doctor looked at us and said “this is a miracle; usually it takes much, much longer for a child to relearn balance after such an intoxication, if they relearn it at all. In many cases the individual remains a ‘vegetable’ all his or her life”. The complications didn’t completely end there though. We immediately changed neurologists and she was tested very regularly after this incident. Her liver was slightly damaged. She continued on medication for a whole of 3 and a half years. During this period she had to have so many tests, so many needles poked into her little body, she NEVER cried or even winced, every time we came to the clinic for tests the whole staff always said: “here comes our little champion” and that is exactly what she was, a fighter and a WINNER.
Today she is a very normal and very typical teenager of 13 years. Looking at her nobody could tell how much she went through as a little child. Sometimes I have to remind myself about what a miracle it is that she is so normal and so “typically teenage”, especially when she tries my patience!
A very important lesson I’ve learned is: never blindly trust even the smartest “specialist”, if your instinct tells you something is wrong, LISTEN TO IT AND ACT UPON IT”!
