Emerging From the Cave

Though I’m not finished with my rewrite, I’m emerging from my cave to update you all on my progress . . . both in life and with the novel.

Life:

K had her neurology appointment on Tuesday. Our insurance won’t cover the expensive testing he would normally do (we’re looking into different insurance), so he did his best to diagnose based on the medical history we gave him as well as the exam he gave her.

He determined she had a few other seizures. One at school when she looked into the overhead projector and didn’t respond for a bit (we found out about that last Friday at parent/teacher conference). The second and third were at home when she was speaking to me, but the what she said didn’t make sense (I hadn’t realized these were seizures, but they were strange behavior so I reported them to him).

So, his diagnosis is viral encephalitis. Since the “treatment” for it would be the same no matter if he ran the tests or not, he opted not to make us file for bankruptcy (nice of him). The treatment is to watch her and see what happens. If she has another seizure, we are to contact him immediately (well, after we call 911, of course). He even gave us his cell phone number. If she does seize again, she’ll be admitted to the hospital and they’ll run all the expensive tests we’re hoping to avoid.

She’s not on any medication at this point. He thinks she’ll continue to recover and within the next two to three weeks, her memory and behavior issues should resolve themselves. He will see her again in January unless she seizes before then. He sent me home with literature about the different types of seizures so we can read up and hopefully learn to identify them (complex partial seizures, simple partial seizures, and atypical absence seizures). Of course if she’s twitching on the floor or being stiff and foaming at the mouth like she did the first time, we’ll know she’s seizing, but the others are more subtle . . . thus the literature.

The kids are on Fall Break for two weeks (gotta love the “modified school year), so I’m not sure how much writing I’ll get done, but here’s that update.

Rewrite:

My current word count looks like this:

I’m hoping to finish by the end of this month so I can participate in National Novel Writing Month again this year. We’ll see if I make it. I’m almost to the point where I can use most of the scenes from the previous novel. Though I’ll have to make a few changes to these scenes to make them work in this version, I’m thinking the changes will be minor (other than the POV change, of course).

And that’s my update. I’ll try to post at least once a week (probably Fridays) from now on.

Write on.