DR Trip 1st Leg: Rough Start

Since Soren started the GFCF diet, we switched him from cow's milk to Almond Breeze, an almond milk which he LOVES (lucky). However, we figured we couldn't go lugging gallons of the drink across the country. So in preparation for our trip I tracked down a powder potato milk that can be mixed with water.

I wisely tested him on the potato milk and while it wasn't a favorite like the almond, he tolerated it just fine. My sister then helped me do the math so I knew how much of this powder I would need to pack to make up 27 oz/day. I triple bagged it and, though I feared I would get busted for smuggling a mysterious white powder into a foreign country, I figured when they realized it tasted like cake mix, they would set me free.

So we set off from LAX to Atlanta on Friday. Before we left home, I got a bottle of the almond drink into Soren, just to be safe. On the plane I mixed up the potato milk, but then failed miserably to get it in Soren. I figured it was just the plane travel. We stopped in Atlanta and made it to our hotel, where we were spending the night. I figured Soren would be desperate for liquid by this point between the plane ride and the lack of drink since 6 that morning. But no. He just dribbled it out. I tried again at dinner to no avail. He was having none of it.

Now, the reason we stayed over night was that we were driving to Chatanooga, TN the next day to visit Aaron's longtime friend Chris and his family. He and his wife Marcie had kindly picked up some of Almond Breeze for our visit. I was hoping Soren could hold through then if he was still a pill in the morning about the potato stuff.

But at 4 am that morning in my sleep I thought I heard something. I got up and Soren appeared to be asleep, but his heart was racing. I figured I had just missed the end of a seizure. This was confirmed at 8 am when he woke with a seizure. He then had another one at 8:40, 9:40, 10:40, and 11:40. Hard, horrible, tonic-clonics. When we saw how things were going, Aaron ran out to a market and bought them out of Almond Breeze. Then the challenge was to rehydrate him between seizures. And even though he was kind of out of it (understandably), he sucked that stuff down like it was liquid gold. After his 11:40 seizure, we gave him Diastat to "reset" his brain.

And I am happy to say that all this worked. Soren is back to being his happy, kicking self. We made it to Chatanooga, though we did start much later than planned and he did have 2 of the seizures on the road. Yesterday was tense, but today has been lovely.

Just goes to show how travel and messing with the routine can really mess up this little guy. The seizures can come out so quickly just with dehydration and stress. But we forge on!

Now we just have a buy another suitcase so we can get all this Almond Breeze to the DR!

Amy