March 2010

We got to spend the first week of March at home in Florence. Sterling was doing better. Although the massive amounts of medications he was on made him loopy and out of it, at least we weren't dealing with non stop seizures. We enjoyed a few days of "normalcy".




Playing with all our MOPS friends. We have a really great group of kiddos!

On March 7th, around 6:30am, just before waking Sterling had a series of 4 tonic clonic seizures. These were the first seizures we had seen since his release from the hospital.
On March 8th, the day before Ella and Sterling's third birthday, we checked back into Children's. This time we were admitted to begin the ketogenic diet. We would spend the first couple days fasting Sterling, then gradually add back in food in the ratio of 3 grams of fat to 1 gram of combined protein/carbohydrate. Think Adkins diet on a much greater and more rigorous scale.


Since Sterling was in the early stages of initiating the diet, commonly referred to as the keto diet, he was only allowed to drink eggnog milkshakes made from egg and heavy cream. So, for their third birthday, we had a milkshake party in the activity room of the hospital. Even in such sad surroundings, we were grateful to celebrate another year of our children's lives, now made even more precious to us.


It was a little bittersweet spending the kid's birthday in the hospital. From Children's I'm able to look across the street and see the hospital where they were born. It was a hard juxtaposition. Three years earlier we had been in a hospital for such a joyous occasion. Now we were in a hospital in a desperate attempt to save our son from the seizures that ravaged his brain. My greatest hope is that he never spends another birthday in the hospital and one day this will all just be a bad nightmare. Until that day, I have this beautiful face to keep me company...