Yesterday I attended a special meeting at my daughter's school regarding the school's seizure action plan for her. In October during her ARD (IEP meeting), the school's diagnostician, school nurse, and I developed her seizure action plan. It was unique to her, including possible triggers, hints that there was going to be a seizure soon, and special first aid during the seizure. In it, we decided that since she hadn't had a seizure in so long, that an ambulance should be summoned after two minutes of active seizing. I wanted this part added to the plan because I couldn't honestly confirm that if she had a seizure, she would stop within a reasonable amount of time. She has a history of experiencing status epilepticus, and I wanted to be sure that if she began to experience it again, medical intervention would be on the way.
Let me tell you about this meeting and about her school...WOW...just amazing. You hear so many horror stories regarding schools and children with special needs. I have a few of them from my daughter's first school. This school has been nothing short of fabulous. There were about fifteen to twenty individuals in the meeting, including the principal and vice principal, school nurses, music teachers, P.E. teachers, classroom teachers, and playground aids. Every single one of them had familiarized themselves with my daughter's seizure action plan, and had questions for me. I talked them through what seizure onset is like for her, and what last week's seizure was like. I talked to them about the importance of timing the seizure, and talking to her throughout the seizure. I walked them through basic first aid regarding seizures, and what to do especially for her. We came up with really good ideas to ensure her safety while she was on campus, and by the time we left that meeting, every single person had came up with their own emergency plan for her in case they were the one to be helping her. (EX. who would evacuate the other kids, who would go for the nurse, where to keep her plan, how to tell substitute teachers, etc.) We also decided that since she's had the first seizure since the med switch, that we could change the time from two minutes to five minutes in regards to summoning an ambulance.
I'm proud of everything we accomplished yesterday for her, but I think that I'm most proud of the fact that the seizure action plan went out to the entire school. Many teachers were confused about why they had been given a seizure action plan for a student that they had never seen before, but the principal explained that there shouldn't be anyone in that school that doesn't know what to do when she has a seizure. I'm taking that logic one step further, though. I think that because they read through the seizure action plan, then they now have a basic idea about what to do if any child has a seizure while in their care. We inadvertently reached about seventy-five people yesterday in regards to seizure safety and epilepsy awareness. Isn't that amazing?
One of my goals is to have every school have a basic first aid staff development for their teachers about what to do if there is a medical emergency in the classroom. It just doesn't have to be seizure first aid. It could cover many, many things, but one of the medical situations covered would be seizures. I work with teachers that still swear that the first thing you do when someone is experiencing a seizure is to put a spoon in the person's mouth so they can't swallow your tongue. Seriously...you can't swallow your tongue. It is physically impossible to do that. If it wasn't, we all would have done it already.
Another day without seizure activity...we're on day 4 of no seizures. Hoping there's many, many more.
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