|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
When Brendan was 8 1/2 years old he was at school when I received a phone call from his school saying that something very strange happened to Brendan. At first I didn't believe them, since I had never seen this sort of thing happen to Brendan. I took him to St. Louis Children's hospital where they told me that seizures in children was quite common and that a lot of times a child can have one and never have another one, Brendan was sent home. The following week, Brendan was at his baseball game with his dad Mark, when I received a call from Mark saying that he thought Brendan was having another one of those things, I told Mark to bring Brendan home immediately. When they arrived home, I took one look at Brendan and told a friend of ours to call 911, Brendan was in a seizure, all he would do is repeat the word "baseball" and stare. From that moment on Brendan's life had changed and so did ours. Since then Brendan has gone through so much, he is such a strong young man. The doctors told us that he had bilateral calcifications on his brain which were causing the seizures and that the calcifications had stopped growing. Brendan was seizure free from May 04 to August 04 - then at his birthday party he had another complex partial seizure that lasted fairly long. Affter that the seizures became more frequent and his medication's dosage kept increasing. In October 04, I called his doctor and asked it there was anyway they could do another MRI to make sure that the calcifications were not growing, the doctor agreed to have it done. The MRI was done on a Friday afternoon and when we arrived home we received a call from Brendan's doctor asking us to please return to the hospital as soon as possible -that had to be the longest car ride.
We went to the Neuro Surgery office where we met Brendan's doctor and she proceeded to tell us that Brendan had a fast growing tumor in his right temporal lobe of his brain and that it needed to be removed as soon as possible. We scheduled surgery for that following Monday morning. The surgery went well, the mass was removed without any complications. Brendan was out of school until the middle of January and had numerous seizures, the doctors did a number of video EEG's to see where the seizures were fireing from, to see if he was able to have surgery to remove a portion of his brain that would help with the seizures. Brendan's seizures came from all different directions, therefore he was not a canidate for surgery. Brendan's medicine dosage has continually gone up and up over the years, Brendan has been diagnosed with many different diseases all which have turned out to be wrong. In July of 06 Shriner's hospital claimed that Brendan's calcifications were definately growing, Children's hospital then confirmed that yes the growths were growing. In November 06, Brendan had a stroke that threw him into a 3 day seizure, they were going to put him in a drug induced coma when he finally pulled out of it. At the present time, doctors seem to believe that he has a genetic disease called Melas. |
 |
