Helpless

I took the honyocks straight to the pool when I picked them up Friday. But Mo didn't seem into it.

She didn't seem to know what she wanted to do. Usually, a question like 'Do you want to go down the white slide or the blue slide?' gets an answer like, 'BLUE SLIDE!' with a gesture that's half finger-point and half pitcher's wind-up. We did one trip down the slide, then she led me to the pool house restrooms, where we'd just been. After some time in there, she got in line for the diving board.

Then she stood out on the end of the diving board while a line accumulated behind her, with me calling out to her to just jump in and swim to the ladder. This is a drill she knows well. She finally went in the drink, but then wanted to loll around and tread water below the board.

When she got to the ladder at last, she took so long to get out that the kid who went after her climbed out around her.

Then she got up on the deck, leaned her head against my chest and started seizing.

Not a spectacular seizure, no thrashing. She just chewed and turned her head and chewed and turned her head and drooled and so on. I eased her to the deck and leaned her against my legs.

It was a long one. At five minutes, Em brought the Diastat, but my understanding was it was only for grand mall seizures, that this kind of partial seizure wasn't really affected by an Elvis dose of Valium. If I thought it would have stopped the seizure, I'd have totally administered it. But I kept it on standby in case the seizure escalated.

Time went by. Lifeguards asked if they could help, but there wasn't really anything they could do. One told me I was free to take her into the pool house, and I had to explain that sitting here drooling was really all she could do at the moment, that if she was capable of responding to instructions and walking, it wouldn't be a seizure.

I know it started right before they called the Adult Swim, which is 7:00, and I know it was 7:15 when we got a very zonked and disoriented Mo into the car to go home. My best guess is twelve minutes. Might have been as little as ten, theoretically could have been as long as fifteen.

In any case, the longest quarter hour.

Then after, the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster tells me the Diastat would have been appropriate. One or the other of us misunderstood the neurologist, because I thought the massive dose of rectal Valium just arrested the muscle spasms of a grand mall seizure, reducing convulsions and avoiding injuries caused by thrashing about. But it seems I let Mo seize for seven minutes when I had a solution on the deck beside me.

I'll have that #2 Parental Stress combo, substitute Guilt for Despair and add a side of Uncertainty.