Hi everyone! It's been a while! We just got home from Chicago visiting Lurie Children's for Patrick's six month post-op appointment. Hard to believe it has been almost 6 months since his surgery!!
This appointment was actually quite a big one. After they did the surgery in March, they did not do any testing to confirm that the surgery was successful in stopping his seizures. They wanted to give his brain time to fully heal so they could get accurate readings and images before confirming anything. Back in March, we put August tentatively in our calendars and have continued to resume life as normal as we can, but have been anxiously anticipating this appointment to see if the surgery was successful.
Patrick had an overnight EEG last Monday. The purpose of EEG's are to read his brain waves and look out for seizure activity. We met with the epileptologist after, and for the first time in his life, Patrick's brainwaves were GREAT. 😭🙏🏻 while the right side of his brain will never be "normal," the EEG confirmed that the surgery stopped seizures from happening and spreading to the healthy brain tissue that he has on the left side.
(The face bandaid is a story for another day. Don't ask 😂)
After that, Patrick went under anesthesia and had an elaborate MRI of his brain. The purpose of this was for Dr. Lam to check two things- 1. Make sure no fluid has accumulated and 2. Double check her work! She was able to zoom in on all of the "cuts" that she had to make in his brain and ensure each cut was made to its entirety. We just got word this afternoon that the MRI looked perfect as well.
As you can imagine, this is a huge sigh of relief for us! The surgery did the job, and Patrick, for the first time since he was 12 weeks old, has a clean bill of health. While this has been the longest year of our lives, it surely has opened our eyes to how lucky we are and what an incredible community we have surrounding us.
From here, we get to resume life as normal!! Patrick will still need quite a bit of physical therapy for the foreseeable future, as learning to navigate life with just a left hemisphere of your brain can be a little bit challenging. He is making such great strides in every aspect of his life. He is getting quite the silly personality, he is communicating with both sounds and gestures, and he is getting very eager to become mobile. In Chicago this past week, the doctor was pretty confident that Patrick's left leg has similar strength and ability to his right leg, which is such a huge blessing. His left arm is definitely impacted, but we are working on that every day!
Patrick's biggest skillset that he's practicing up on right now is becoming a big brother!! Baby Marvel number two is coming early February.
I'm not really sure what the future of this blog entails. Hopefully not much. You can all assume that for now, no news is good news!! We will head back to Chicago every single March for likely the next 16 years for a yearly check up with Dr. Lam. Other than that, we are neurologist free!
Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your constant prayers, text messages, love, DoorDash gift cards, literally everything. We could not have done this without all of you! Thank you and we love you. 🤍🤍🤍🤍
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Love it! Thank you so much for the update. Such wonderful news! Hugs to everyone! xoxo
Such an incredible blessing your Patrick is! So are you both, along with Dr. Lam!
Now, time to enjoy the additional blessings you have been given! :)
Love to you all. The Zeman's!!!