My Dear Younger Sister

Emily has always been the most energetic and eccentric sibling in the family. Her voice projects across the room quite easily, especially when she's excited during a conversation in a restaurant. Irregardless of any public embarrassment, I love my sister very much.

It's tough when I see Emily struggle with her health problem. Last year, on the morning of Thanksgiving, she had her first seizure while staying at my parent's house. My mom was the first person to hear disturbing noises from my sister's room. Because it was locked, they had to break the door down to help her. The doctors at the emergency room couldn't figure out why it happened. She never had a major health problem until now. For all we knew, it could have been an isolated incident triggered by stress. This proved to be more than a random occurrence.

My sister had another seizure a couple weeks after Thanksgiving. Over the past 10 months she has had 11 seizures. This has been extremely frustrating for everyone in my family. Each time she has a seizure, she is sore for several days afterward. Seizure patients often look like they just had a stroke. They took her license away for obvious reasons. She lives in San Francisco, so thankfully she can walk around everywhere she needs to go. Unfortunately, this also means she is far from family in Gilroy if she needs our help. I am the closest family member, so I'm usually the one in the emergency room with her when there's a problem.

I will refrain from going over most of the medical details surrounding her treatment, but they have run quite a few tests on Emily over the months. The doctors at Kaiser have been mystified as to why she continues having episodes when she is on medication that's supposed to prevent it. My parents decided to send her to Stanford which is where they found a growth in her brain. Thankfully it wasn't a malignant brain tumor, but nonetheless troubling that there is something abnormal there. This week, Emily has been in the hospital for a sleep-study. They wanted to monitor her while inducing a seizure (by taking her off the anticonvulsants and manipulating her sleep patterns). She had a seizure while they were monitoring her. The source of the seizure came from the abnormal part of her brain. Now they are likely going to perform brain surgery and remove the defective area.

I'm worried about what will happen to my sister. At the same time, I'm relieved that there is now a tangible problem for the doctors to work on. All I can hope for is that she has a successful surgery with minimal side-effects and her seizures go away. Toward the end of the semester, I will write another blog with an update on her status.