Good news

Finally.

Wednesday Lively had an appointment with his neurologist. First he had an EEG.

Pete and I have been worried because for the last week, Lively has been posturing with his left hand. He might be sitting or laughing or sucking his thumb, or chewing on his Sophie the giraffe toy, and suddenly he will stop, open his left hand in front of his face, and stare at it for a moment. He's doing it in the picture above, and in the one below.

When I first saw him do this, around a week ago, I was excited, because until that time he had been clenching his hand, which made me worry about spasticity and cerebral palsy. So to see his hand open made me happy. But something about the way he repeated this posture, and the fact that we were seeing it more frequently each day made Pete and me think of his seizures. We hadn't seen any obvious seizures in around 5 days, but as Lively underwent his EEG, we realized that he was probably having a new kind of seizure.

However, his EEG looked much better. It was still abnormal, but there were no definite seizures, and no hypsarrythmia. Most of the abnormalities were in the right side of his brain, in the region we know was affected by the stroke. There did not seem to be a correlation between his hand posturing and an EEG abnormality. The line in the assessment on which I'm focusing is, "Compared to the prior EEG, dated 2/24/2010, this study is markedly improved."

Lively's neurologist does think that his hand posturing is likely related to his stroke, and may be some "evolving dystonia." Basically, we still don't know what his motor deficits (or cognitive deficits) will be, and it may be many months before we know what is going on with his hand.

Overall, we finished the day feeling that the news was positive. EEG, better. Development (sitting, cooing), better. If we don't think about the hand thing, or the risk of seizures in the future thing, or the fact that we might have to go back for another 24-hour EEG if he keeps doing the hand thing thing, then the news is pretty good. Really.