My most traumatic experience yet as a father: Having witnessed my daughter — my special needs daughter — lose control of her motor functions in every sense of the word. It was as if an invisible force was choking her sideways that she couldn't turn her head to a point of suffocation. Dalya’s entire body jerked violently.
Dalya had just had a seizure.
It occured consecutively throughout the day, each time far worse than I could bear. Her frothing mouth is not a sight I could ever forget. I thought that was it. I recited the Shahada for her in tears, shaking.
We rushed to the hospital, and Dalya was admitted over the weekend, because there were no specialists available. The ward stay pushed my sanity to its limits. I wasn't able to do anything but watch my attempts to calm a self-harming child fall apart when we are without access to our crisis management routine. She scratched, she bit, she banged, she bled. Nobody present was able to help, save for the emergency sleeping dose every time she went out of control.
Tests were done, and everything was “normal” as a healthy child should be SO FAR. Without going into the details, the takeaway is that this is going to be a recurring episode that we need to always be on alert for, due to Dalya’s Smith-Magenis Syndrome condition.
We are now back home, settling into the provisional medication from different specialists of their respective departments to treat her individual symptoms.
If there's anything good that came out of this, is that Dalya will no longer be on this journey alone.
