Ataque

I am slowly and painfully becoming bilingual. Amy is so excited and motivated to learn Spanish, which shows me how lazy and stubborn I've been these past 10 months. I completely sympathize with all those immigrants that live their whole lives in the States without ever learning English.

But unfortunately the word ataque isn't a pleasant one. Hosanna had another seizure.

This past Tuesday she had a slight fever and runny nose. She was very tired but would not go to bed so I finally convinced (bribed) her to sit on my lap and she fell asleep right away. Within a few minutes I could feel her arms and legs twitching. At first I thought it was just a shiver or something from the fever but when I pulled her head away from me I could see that her eyes were rolled back in her head. That took me right back to her whole viral week-long near-death episode back in April. Not a good sign.

I yelled, slapped her a little, cried, called Enoch, did what any scared helpless parent would do. Then she started turning purple. I could hear her struggling to breathe, limbs still twitching, eyes still rolled back. I tried to pry my fingers in her mouth but her jaw was locked shut. So I flipped her over and gave her back a few hearty smacks, trying to get her tongue to roll out of her throat. It must have worked.

The whole seizure lasted several minutes, the purple part about one minute. That is an extemely long time when you are thinking that every microsecond might be your baby's last. After her color came back and her body was still she stayed unconscience for about two hours. When she woke up she obviously felt pretty sick, but it was a bad cold kind of sick not a swollen brain kind of sick.

We flew her to Panama City and by the time she got there she was laughing and running around. Her fever broke that night and she has nothing more than a snotty nose now. They ran some tests on her at the clinic there and everything came back clear.

We aren't sure what is going on with this child of ours but we intend to find out. I took her temperature right after the seizure and it was only 100 so it seems unlikely that it was caused by a sudden spike in temperature, but we don't know what else it could be. Needless to say, I'm keeping a close eye on her.

The pains of being a parent are more than I ever imagined.

And once again God pours out his mighty blessings on our family and we get to keep Hosanna with us.