Coincidence?

As I've mentioned in some previous posts, Hollis has been eating extremely well since the week after the surgery. Eating has been a huge problem for her since about this time last year. She suddenly decided to stop eating altogether for about 2 weeks in July 2007, and when we finally were able to get her to resume, she would only eat a few items: pepperoni and sour cream and onion potato chips were her staples. Because she ate so little and because it had almost no nutritional value, she lost about 10 pounds in a month's time, which was equivalent to 20% of her starting weight - and, she was not a chubby kid to start with. She also lost about half her hair.

We always assumed it was related to one of her seizure meds, Topamax, which has a known side effect of decreased appetite. Unfortunately, this happens to be the most effective medicine she uses, as we found out when we took her off the Topamax for the surgery evaluation/seizure monitoring, and she promptly had 55 seizures in one day. So we were kind of stuck.

What I never really considered was the constant seizure activity she was having could have been making her nauseous. There are many different symptoms that people can suffer related to their seizures, (a list is available here), but because Hollis is nonverbal, the only symptoms we were positive she had was the exhaustion and post-seizure behavior of anger and frustration. Perhaps now, without all the excess electrical activity going on, Hollis's tummy is feeling better.