A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the trauma of taking my youngest son, Micah, to get an EEG.

It was a tale of pain, agony and general child abuse.

It was also my birthday (woo hoo)

(The full story of that disastrous day is here: http://familiesonly.com/Community/blogs/overdad/archive/2009/05/21/torture.aspx )

Well, after the test we sat around for a week or so waiting for the various doctors involved to mail one another the results and then get off their duff and tell us about it.

Not to my surprise, we waited a long time.

Eventually, it came down to me making a few phone calls before we could get anyone to actually bother to track down these results and share them with us.  I talked to a nurse and she said that they had not received the results but would make some phone calls.  A couple of hours later she called back and said simply that “the results were normal.”

That’s the full extent of what we were told.

This is good news, obviously.  Very good news, but it’s not all the news.

You see, something happened to my son that day when we had the staring spell.

Now, it’s actually relatively common for kids (and occasionally adults) to 023have a single seizure.  What is not particularly common is for this to be one of the petit mal “staring seizures.”  It’s also not common for those kinds of seizures to last as long as Micah’s incident.  They tend to last just a few seconds, where Micah’s was well over a minute.

So, it seems likely that something else happened to him during that minute or so when he left us, but what?

So I am left with the bizarre feeling of disappointment. I certainly didn’t want my son to be diagnosed with epilepsy, but it did feel like it would be an explanation, and one with a likely solution.  Instead I am left with a son who had something happen to him, but we have no idea what.

To complicate matters, my son has had some delays.  He didn’t walk until 18 months and, even now, as he closes in on his second birthday has a fairly limited vocabulary.  He says “Da-da” and “no,” and a handful of other words consistently and a whole slue of words inconsistently, but by any measure he is at least 9 months behind (which when that’s almost half of your life, is significant).

Now, it was never clear that these delays would have been tied to epilepsy, even if he had been diagnosed with it, but it seemed to give us something to grasp on to. 

I have some good friends who have a child who has physical and speech delays that are more significant than Micah’s.  Because the delays were more pronounced they began looking for a cause very early on.  Their daughter has been through EEGs and MRIs and a whole range of other tests: all of which have basically come up normal and yet there is no doubt in the minds of the parents and the doctors that there is something wrong – something not normal – going on.

No one wants their child to be diagnosed with any kind of illness, but the not knowing seems almost as bad, because the fear, of course, is that it could be something even worse.

I’m sure that if we wanted to, we could demand that an MRI be done, or insist on a series of tests, each more random and desperate than the last, but that’s not really who we are.  I am not one to jump to conclusions about things.  If anything, I’m prone to thinking that things will turn out fine. 

But you can’t help but worry when you see that something is clearly not right.

So, for now, we’re just going to take a deep breath and take a step back .  We’re going to simply wait and see if anything else happens.  And then, if it does, figure out what to do next. 

But even without a clear medical issue, there is still the obvious speech and possible cognitive delays my son has.

The optimistic side of me suspects that they are nothing.  At 18 months, Micah was still not walking, but once he took those first couple of steps, he was off like a light and walks and climbs like there was never any problem.  There’s a big part of me that assumes that the speech will come in a similar  manner – there will be months of babbling followed by an influx of words and sentences until, after a few short months, no one would ever be able to believe that he was behind.

But there’s also a part of me that’s not so sure – a part of me that is concerned that my son is suffering from something much more than the need for a few more months of time.

When I was a kid there was a ludicrously awful cartoon called GI Joe (soon to be a ludicrously awful movie).  It was great.  Anyway, at the end of every episode there was this bizarre teachable moment, which I can only assume was mandated by the FCC.

The army guys would have just gotten done saving the world from nuclear annihilation by the evil Cobra organization and then it would cut to a scene with two kids crossing the street.  They’re about to walk out into traffic when a fatigued, gun toting super soldier swoops in on a flying motorcycle and stops them.  He teaches them that they are always supposed to look both ways before crossing the street or some similarly inane lesson.

This mini-moment always ended the same way.  The kids would have learned to not be morons and to look for cars and then they would say something like “Gawrsh, thanks Sir, now we know.”

And GI Joe would stand there with an American flag flapping behind him and say

“And knowing is half the battle!”

Because I grew up in the 80s and because I’m a dork, I remember this and I think back to it every once in a while.

For us, with Micah - knowing IS half the battle…but we don’t know anything.

Which means we haven’t even started the battle yet.

And that’s what worries me.