This post was inspired by Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop.

It was early summer of 2007 and Tyler was about nine months old.  Grant had been put on a new medication and just wasn’t feeling right.  He was seeing “flashes” and was stuttering and shaking.  It was all happening too fast to see a doctor.

I was feeding Tyler, we were all watching t.v., when suddenly Grant began to have a seizure!  I had never seen one before but it’s something you know when you see it.  And then I panicked. I still feel badly about it, but I practically threw Tyler on the ground and went over to Grant. Tyler was screaming, mostly because I was.  I dialed 9-1-1 and told them what was happening. They are telling me to calm down, stop crying, yeah right!

Grant seemed to have stopped and I calmed down, but about 30 seconds later he started to seize again. The 9-1-1 operator told me I had to get Grant to lie down on the floor on his side, but Grant was fighting me through the seizure and of course he is stronger than I am.  We fell from the couch to the ground, I was wrestling him.  I truly thought he was going to die. By the time I finally got him on the floor he had stopped seizing and the EMTs were here.

I so wanted to go with my husband to the ER but I had a little baby depending on me too.  It felt strange letting Grant go alone.  Luckily, one of my neighbors came after the ambulance pulled away and she volunteered to stay with Tyler and put him to bed so that I could go to the hospital.

I went and stayed with him for a while, helped him settle into the ER and then had to go home to Tyler. I learned how it felt to be torn in two and it was the first time I realized that Tyler had to come first, no matter how sick Grant was.

It turned out that Grant had a reaction to the new medication and has since avoided it, with no more seizures.  But it was definitely one of the scariest times of my life and so hard to choose between the two people who mean the most to me in life.