John's seizures have continued to increase in number since my last post. They have also increased in intensity again. He has had many days of 30+ seizures again, with some seizures back to lasting a couple of seconds. Yoshie thinks he may have also had a couple of drop seizures yesterday, though she isn't 100% sure. I can't imagine making him wear the helmet again, so hopefully these incidents were nothing. We haven't changed anything, and we've even gone back to the herbal formula that he was on a few weeks ago when things were going so well. His good and bad stretches once again appear to be completely random. He does have a bit of a cold now, and that could well be the culprit this time.

John has remained on 37.5mg Lamictal and 5.5ml of Felbatol for quite awhile now. We were hoping to further reduce his Lamictal but we're not going to do it when things are going backwards. John has also remained on a gluten-free, dairy-free, and limited sugar diet. This may have helped his stomach issues (as he no longer has issues!), but sure doesn't appear to help the seizures.

Yoshie is continuing to do a lot of therapy with John, with the guidance of our ABA therapist. She is now doing two 50 minute sessions per day. Most days, John does pretty well with this. He is still making progress, albeit at a very slow pace.

The naturopath had us do an organic acid test. So, John had to further limit his diet for 48 hours, and we sent the test off. There was some acid that came in outside of the normal boundaries and would be very unusual if true. To verify this, we have to re-do the test, which means he's back on the very stringent diet for the next couple of days. I suspect the herbs are messing with the test results.
John is still taking an iron supplement. We'll get his ferritin level checked again next week. Hopefully we can get that back in the normal range.

John has continued to go to his preschool and his Early Intervention class, both with mixed results. John has a hard time with "circle time" especially. Yoshie continues to accompany him to both classes, though we're still hoping to begin to phase her out with time. We've had a couple of meetings with the EI team. The first one resulted in a Psychologist monitoring John in several scenarios: home, EI, and preschool. The next meeting she presented her report, which basically recommended that John remain in his current setting, with the goal of getting Yoshie phased out. We requested a 1 on 1 aid again, and hopefully that will come through - though I doubt it. We also are getting a recommendation to be evaluated by the autism program. Some of the EI specialists don't think this is a good idea, because it's really intense and they think it would be too much for John. What we argue is that those kids get exponentially more services than John, including a daily speech therapist. We were told again that 15 minutes/month of speech therapy is a lot in John's case. In any case, we feel that it doesn't hurt to try. If it's too much, we'll take him out.
We have another meeting with EI next week.

We did get out trick or treating on Halloween. John wasn't very interested, of course. He just doesn't understand it. He was mostly interested in picking up barkdust from people's yards and throwing any ball he could find. He was a furry monster, which was a good choice since it was really cold that night! (click below for some halloween pics!)

John1