Growing Pains

I'm delighted to say Scrumpy went to a friends' house for tea last week. I didn't go, she was invited for an evening of computer games with chips and burgers for tea. An unremarkable event, and for most 13 year-olds it most certainly is, but this is the first and only time Scrumpy has been invited.

When she was little, Mums would nervously approach me to negotiate "because she is, well, a bit different.....will she manage..... I'll understand if you don't want to..." Believe me, I've heard every version of the "charity invite" that "oh cripes they know I'm having a party I'll have to invite them but please let them say no"

I started this post a while ago and as is the habit, life got in the way and called a halt to my writing. We've had growing pains of another kind - including hospital visits.

Scrumpy is still having seizures all the time including at least weekly major tonic clonic which I'm afraid to say have not been effected one bit by the last new medication. All we managed to do with that was add to her troubles so fell at the first level with that one. This week we had our first experience of seizure activity requiring hospital visit via ambulance. It all kicked off while she was at the respite centre - we got "the call" at 7.50am, definitely not what you want when you were relishing a rare lie in.

Thankfully all was well and she was able to get home after a few hours. The hospital staff were great but I'd rather not meet them again for a while.

So, now we have two - and only two - options for treatment. Ketogenic diet or VNS. Ketogenic diet is going to be tough and we're waiting for the dietitian for advice if this is even doable with Scrumpy's restricted pallet but from the little i know it could be well worth trying. The downside, and I feel it's a big down side, is all the hard work we've done in encouraging her to eat things like pasta and not white bread will be thrown away.

As for VNS, well, the same sword of Damocles still hangs in the air. Do we put her through surgery or do we hope she gets the other side of puberty and stops having seizures on her own?

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Now, onto outside growing - we still have ducks waiting for dispatch and I'm hoping this will happen sooner rather than later for the sake of our feed bill if nothing else. This week has also seen the start of preparations for the 2011 growing season so fingers crossed for good weather (country file forecast was for wet this week)

In other news, while I'm here, we are now a two dog family again! A couple of weeks ago, just before Bear's 12th birthday, Mickey came into our lives. He's a 4 year old black and white boarder collie with sticky up ears and a great nature. He adores the girls and is convinced, totally, that if he stares at his toy for long enough it really will levitate so he can chase it.

Interestingly, there have been a lot of "Ollie disappeared" from Scrumpy (Ollie was our dog who died 3 years ago) so for all she makes out she's not interested in dogs they obviously make a connection some how. Also interesting was Mickey's reaction to seeing Scrumpy have aseizure. He was totally unphased but showed interest to the extent I will be contacting the disability dog training people with a view to him being a seizure dog. I'm not sure what this would involve but I'll find out (at some point!) and let you know.