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This is a positive RAS story as my 3 year old has pretty much grown out of his seizures. But here’s the background.
One night my daughter ran to me to say that Manny wasn’t well. In fact he was slumped blue and unconscious on the floor – crumpled up over the bar of a chair. He was 11 months old and at that crawling/trying to walk stage and I still don’t know exactly what triggered that terrible attack.
We went to hospital in an ambulance and by the time we got there Manny was getting back to normal. The staff were great - if confused. Chest x-rays and epilepsy tests showed nothing was wrong. Then we saw a heart specialist who diagnosed RAS. He said the reason he knew about RAS was because quite a few children had been referred to him with possible heart problems.
For the next few months Manny had fits almost everyday triggered by a one-year-old’s definition of ‘trauma’; fingers caught in a drawer; not being able to reach a toy. However there was a pattern. It almost always happened in the last hour of the day or before his lunchtime sleep. It seemed that if he was tired his body was far less able to cope with shocks. My main concern was to make sure he was in a safe environment when he had an attack and laid flat on the floor so his windpipe was unobstructed. Soon his 4 year old sister had become adept at laying him down while he had a seizure.
Rather than send him to nursery I employed a childminder so that someone who knew about RAS was always looking him after.
However, over the next 2 years the seizures become less frequent and Manny started bringing himself out of them on him own. He still goes blue and rolls his eyes when he hurts himself but he starts breathing quite soon, even in a sitting up position. He’s been at nursery for 6 months with no problems to date and the hospital eventually discharged him when it became apparent that I knew more about RAS than they did!
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