OK fine, since it looks like my loyal fan base is still checking in anyways even though I suck at posting, here we go:

I spent 9 days total in the hospital. The first couple days were alright, I had to meet with a psychologist (routine for the VEEG)...this was probably the best part of the stay because he said he agreed with the old psychologist in the other hospital (who was then 'overruled' by the epileptologist, as if he knew more about psychology than the psychologist)...anyways he agreed with the other psychologist and said that I am NOT having psychological seizures, anxiety attacks, etc. Yay!! Finally they believe me!!!

They spent the next couple days taking me quickly off meds and waiting for big seizures to show up. Since all I was having were visual seizures, and those are too small to show up on the EEG (as are many simple partial seizures), they needed something bigger. So on Friday night, I was not allowed to sleep. I got to sleep ~6 hours on Saturday night and the same on Sunday night, and then on Monday they took my sleep away again. So from about 7:30 on Friday morning to 12:30 on Tuesday night I got about 12 hours of sleep. Whoopee. They also wanted me to get working on my final term paper, so that they could 'REALLY re-create the stress of school,' but I didn't have everything there that I needed. And I didn't really want to anyways. But I humored them by at least reading some of my portuguese book that I brought, which was hard enough. And I knitted a lot and read the Da Vinci Code...an ok book, super-hyped, I had some issues with it but I won't get into them now.

Anyways, during ALLL of this (and even CAFFEINE they made me drink on Monday night!) I had guess how many big bad seizures: NONE!!!! (are you KIDDING me?!)

I was so completely frustrated. Also I called Bridget on Friday night when I wasn't asleep (after I woke Sarah up at her grandma's) and she was at a bar and her drunk roommate answered and hung up on me twice. It made me sad. :(

So the doctor was probably frustrated too, cause they couldn't do anything to treat me if I wasn't producing...The weekend doctor came in and discussed surgery options with me (which currently don't exist because I wasn't giving any clues as to where in my brain the seizures are coming from) and other meds, one of which the 'real' doctor refused to consider cause it apparently has extremely rare but extremely fatal side effects. I discussed gridding with the weekend doc (where they shave your head, slice open your skull and put electrodes directly on your brain) and he said they COULD now but it would mean they'd have to grid my whole brain instead of just a section and that would be a bunch of unpleasantness, so can I please have a seizure now so we can narrow it down?

Eventually they said, well, we'll keep you as long as we can but there are more patients coming in and we need your bed. So you'll have to go home on Thursday. So I went home on Wednesday. And they put me on a new medicine (like I mentioned in the last post) on Tuesday night and it makes my feet and ankles and legs swell up huge and hard to walk (since I can't bend my ankles thus) and that's just awesome.

My EEG techs were interesting-- one came in my room and said, "hmmm, you look familiar." I looked up and said, "no way! Did you work at {this other hospital}??" Turns out my favorite EEG tech from the other hospital migrated to the other side of the river. Awesome. She even remembered how my friends (including Thrasher) decorated my hospital room, and Johanna coming to visit. Then it turns out that another tech goes to Macalester currently (a junior) and another one just graduated from Mac (this was found out because I had 2 friends over playing cards and he walks into the room and they all say "What are you doing here?!" Haha.) So it's a small world and I spend too much time in hospitals, is the moral of this paragraph.

But I liked this hospital a lot better, because they had carpet on the floors and the rooms were more like hotel rooms than hospitally, and the nurses and everyone treated you a lot more like a person. Also it was cool because there were several people around my age (if around my age encompasses everything from 19-32 and maybe throw in a couple people in their 40s who were cool) and we hung out all the time in the lounge -- felt kinda like a dorm!! Haha. In a weird sort of way, like, if in this dorm you are constantly on video camera and you cheer for other people when they have a seizure in front of you, then when they wake up you laugh at them. But 2 people always helped me stay up at night, one even stayed up til after 5 with me on Monday night, when I was really having trouble. (Friday night, surprisingly, even through Saturday night when I was allowed to go to sleep, I didn't have much trouble at all.)

OK, this is too long, no one's gonna read it, but it makes up for lots of missing days.