This Past Weekend

I’m getting a lot of questions about what happened to Maggie this past weekend, so I thought an update might be appropriate.

Background: Overall, Maggie has been doing very well over the past year. However, back in August,  Maggie started having a lot of headaches  – constant throughout the day and in tremendous pain. It turns out they were related to a drug she was taking. So, her doctors took her off. We didn’t know it at the time, but the drug she was on was also helping to stabilize most of the tremors Maggie experiences. Left unchecked, these tremors build up and then end up putting her in the hospital with non-stop seizure activity. Not a good thing.

So, from August through this weekend, her tremors have been slowly getting worse and we couldn’t figure out why. Maggie woke up on Saturday ready to go on a Youth Retreat and was tremoring more than usual, but we chalked it up to low blood sugar, nervousness, etc and hoped that it would pass. As the day wore on, Maggie had difficulty coping with the sensory issues related to the retreat, which in turn made it next to impossible for her to sleep. Maggie shook all night while trying to get to sleep. Kathi was next to her the whole time.

On Sunday, Kathi called and told me what was going on. As much as Maggie wanted to stay and do “normal teenager things”, I knew it wasn’t safe for her. We needed to get her home in a quiet place and then get her to a doctor as soon as possible. Otherwise, she would have ended up in the hospital for several weeks. So, the girls and I drove up to Winter Park and got Maggie and Kathi. That night, Kathi and I started talking and thinking about what all had changed over the months, and we began to tie it back to the drug her doctor took her off of. That evening, Maggie slept for 12 hours, the most she has slept in months. Being in a quiet place does wonders.

Long story short – we got Maggie to the doctor on Monday afternoon and they started her back on a similar drug that we hope will not have the negative side effects of constant migraines. We’ll wait and pray to see how God works through this.

The difficult part is that this is Maggie’s life for the foreseeable future…a rollercoaster of ups and downs, living in shades of gray, not healed but living. Maggie is living in those shades of gray, though, by grace alone to the glory of God