Tears of Graditude

Today I was going through some papers and found an envelope. I cried a few tears as I remembered the day I scribbled the times on the envelope. Tears of gratitude.

I remember sitting at my desk watching helplessly as Ryan kept seizing over and over. 16 times in 10 minutes. (This must have been one of the early recordings because it increased to 60-70 times in 20 minutes.) I really didn't even know then that the odd movements were seizures. I just knew that something wasn't right. My heart ached. Each of the recorded times represents a myoclonic seizure. The "choking" incident above I now know as a general seizure.

So, why the tears of gratitude? Well, thanks to an unknown number of people Ryan has medicines that do a fairly good job of controlling the seizures. They're not perfect, but we have less than a dozen a day now.

Have you ever thought about how many people have sacrificed to go to school to help develop the drugs or the medical technologies that help to treat the conditions that you or your loved ones deal with? I frequently think of the sacrifices that our doctors and their families have made to have the knowledge they have, but I haven't really spent much time before thinking of the countless people who have worked on the medicines and the technologies that help so much. But today I feel thankful for them.