This was not the day I planned to have. This morning as I was walking home from dropping Yrsa off at pre-school, I thought to myself, Ah, 6½ glorious hours to get some work done. Alas, it was not to be.

I should probably preface this by saying that everything is okay, but it was a pretty stressful morning for sure. As soon as I walked in the door, Tage yelled down the stairs that Lydia had just called and needed something. I assumed that it was bus money or the like that she was after, but as soon as she answered the phone when I called her back, she said, “I need you to come out here and take care of me. Something is really wrong with me.” Yikes.

After I asked her a few questions, it seemed as though she’d probably had a seizure (she has epilepsy, remember), and as she was feeling bad and was home alone she was pretty freaked out. I said I’d be there as soon as I could–she lives about twenty minutes away from us–grabbed my purse and hurried out the door. She had told me that she wasn’t feeling strong enough to come open the door for me so that I’d have to go over to the landlady next-door and get her key to get in, so I made that brief stop before going in to check on my girl.

When I walked in, she was conscious and lucid, but lying on the bedroom floor and not really moving. I tried to get more information from her, but wasn’t really sure what had happened. Because she was so still, I asked her to wiggle her toes, at least, so that I’d know that she could move. That went okay, and after a couple of more minutes I told her that she probably ought to go to the hospital. Generally she balks at that, and it’s true that she usually doesn’t need to go in after a seizure, but it was testament to how bad she was feeling that she readily agreed. I didn’t think I could manage getting her to the car myself, and I still wasn’t sure what exactly was going on, so I called for an ambulance.

The EMTs arrived after twenty minutes that felt like twenty hours and, after talking to her for a bit, they got her on a gurney and loaded her into the ambulance. I grabbed some extra clothes and whatnot for her, and followed them to town in the car. Once at the hospital, it was basically a case of hurry-up-and-wait. Throughout the course of the next couple of hours, she had an EKG and a neurological exam, and had blood taken, plus got a bag of IV fluid because she had a bad headache and had been throwing up. All of the tests came back normal, but she was still feeling pretty poorly after a few hours, so the doctor offered to let her stay overnight if she wanted. She considered it briefly, but in the end she mostly just wanted to sleep in her own bed, so I drove her and David back to their place and got her settled on the couch with a blanket before heading back home just before four in the afternoon.

It seems most likely that she had a seizure while she was sleeping and somehow “woke up” in the middle of it, which has never happened. She has never been conscious during a seizure before (something the doctor confirmed is rare), and the whole experience shook her up a lot. Not ever having been an active participant in her seizures, so to speak, she really didn’t know what was going on and she was quite understandably terrified.

All’s well now, however, and she’s home with her absolutely wonderful boyfriend, who not only left work and came to the hospital shortly after we arrived there, but is also staying home from work tomorrow so that she doesn’t have to be home alone. To be completely honest, a big part of my mother’s heart would rather that she were here with me, but I know that she’s in good hands where she is.