John's seizures came as a complete shock to Yoshie and I. John was a completely happy and healthy kid before all of this started. He was cognitively on track up through his 18mo check-up at least.
Yoshie first noticed something strange when John was around 22 months old. He seemed to blank out for just a bit when we were at a swimming party. I don't think she even mentioned it to me. In any case, we weren't at all concerned. At around 23 months, we started seeing his head drop every now and then. It was just like you sometimes see when young kids fall asleep while eating. Yoshie began to get concerned, but I brushed it off as nothing. She even called the pediatrician at one point, but was told that this was just normal for kids his age. She made an appt. anyway to see the Dr. just a couple of days before his birthday. About this time, we also started to realize that John wasn't learning words anymore. In fact, it seemed he really hadn't learned any words since about 18 months. He had a total vocabulary of about 30 words (between Japanese and English), which wasn't enough for an almost 2 year old. Still, we weren't overly concerned.
About 10 days before his 2nd birthday, the head drops started happening more frequently, and he started having several in a row. I think at this point we started to realize something was really wrong. On June 5, we went to Maya's dance recital, and John was having these episodes quite frequently. On June 6, I went out for my normal weekend bike ride, but turned around early just because I was worried about John. When I got home, he came up to me and blanked out, which resulted in him falling right on me. He was out for a couple of seconds. It scared me to death. We went directly to the urgent care clinic. He continued to have these little seizures during the seemingly endless wait at the clinic. Yoshie finally complained that he was "passing out" and they let us right in. He continued to have these little seizures while the doctor looked at him. Nobody ever called these "seizures", but she wanted us to go directly to the ER. This came as a shock, as we still thought maybe he just had an ear infection or something that was causing him to have a bad headache or something.
