Rough Trazodone Day

Mira had a bad morning. She started twitching during breakfast, with some periodic 'lightning' jerks, that almost look like an extended startle reflex. Those progressed into some heavier myoclonics, then into a series of pre-tonic-clonics. She kept having this mixture of startles, myos, and near TCs for a solid hour. She had breaks between all of the seizures and her breathing was never altered between each one, but every 5 minutes or so, she would have some combination of seizure activity. This clustering of repetitive seizures is something we have become all too familiar with this year, this being at least the 4th or 5th time since April.

I think this activity has been going on for a few days now, we just hadn't witnessed it this heavily until this morning. I noticed a lot of eye fluttering and eye shifting yesterday during dinner, where she would turn her head, locking her gaze onto her left side, and her eyes would literally shift back and forth a few times. All of this would last about 5-10 seconds - all of it was obvious seizure activity, just a variation we have not seen for awhile.

All this being said, ended up giving her trazodone about mid-morning, because the seizures just would not stop. It kicked in about 45 minutes later and she was finally able to get some rest. She ended up sleeping for several hours, even only on a half-dosage. When she woke up, she was in a miserable mood - wailing and crying, so back in her chair she went to have something to eat. I get the feeling that some of the medications just give her a sort of pharmaceutical hangover, where she wakes up groggy, with a headache, and nauseous. She pushed back three bottles within 15 minutes and started crying to be back in her bed.

Overall, she has had a rough day. This morning, she stepped down on the Vimpat and is now 3/4 of the way through the wean. She is at such a low dosage, that it is probably not doing much of anything. As I had stated in my last post, we are definitely seeing an increase in seizures, but we want to wait until she is fully done with this medication before we start something else. We have literally completely run out of options with AEDs, as she has tried every available one on the market, thus we are trying something different once she is fully weaned, with a low dosage SSRI.