Seizures

Larissa and I went to her follow up neurology appointment. I was wrong, she did not have 3 seizures, she had 8. Eight seizures during 5 hours of sleep. There is an impact in Larissa’s life. She is always tired. We homeschool because mornings are hard for her. When woken up she typically has a seizure. All night she has seizures. She walks around tired all the time. Pain is more severe because of this. Stubbing a toe brings her to tears and she stubs them often. She struggles with retaining newly learned things and struggles with short term memory.

Interestingly, her neurologist noticed that she has SC Medicaid and moaned. She said that they have people move to NC for epilepsy care because SC Medicaid won’t cover a lot of stuff. Thankfully, Larissa also has Tricare. The medication she is on was not covered by Medicaid and they had to get approval from Tricare to have it covered. I was shocked, it costs $3500/month. I don’t understand why these medications cost so much. I imagine that if we didn’t have other insurance that they would have used a cheaper option. If necessary we would move out of state.

The Medicaid program here in SC is awful. Sarah is now too old to be on our insurance and she is still a student so we have to pay for her insurance, $423 a month. I thought that Obamacare was supposed to ensure that everyone could get affordable insurance. Not true and if your state didn’t vote in the expanded Medicaid the poorest can’t afford insurance. This is the insurance foster kids are on. Our foster teen needs braces. She has headaches from her teeth. Orthodontists are not covered. If we wanted to put braces on her we would have to pay for them! It is simply not in our budget right now. DSS does nothing to help. I have been looking at resources but haven’t found anything helpful yet.



Currently we are slowly increasing Larissa’s medicine dosage, hoping it helps without nasty side effects. Say a prayer!