Write everything down. Take notes on envelopes and receipts. Keep all this in one place. Just date it and throw it in the box or drawer. That way these facts are not swirling around in your mind and cluttering your thinking. When you need some bit of information from your stash, get a notebook, paper and tape. Use them to organize the scraps. We use dividers to separate the years.
I cannot tell you how many times I started worrying about something in the middle of the night and had to go to “the drawer” to retrieve a forgotten piece of data before I could go back to sleep. All those pieces of paper saved Rose and resulted in our book.
We made a chart for each year and wrote down any event. We can glance at that one page and get a sense of how our lives were at that time. It is nice to put this away for safe-keeping instead of remembering it over and over.
When medications were being changed quickly, we made a different chart with drugs, days, seizures and side effects right there in black and white. We took these to appointments. Nobody argues with paper.
I learned this trick as a teacher. I posted the rules on the wall of my classroom. When a rule was broken the student might try to argue. It was then I would simply walk to the poster and point to the broken rule and pause. The rules had been up since day one. No reasonable person would argue.
So the file drawer eventually became two full file cabinets. They are full of marked up seizure books we have read, articles we researched. All her records of every prescription by years are in one drawer. Twenty years went by in the blink of an eye, but it’s all there if I need it. Nobody argues with paper.
Once when we were leaving the EMU, Rose was being sent home on dosages that were too low. The doctor in charge was abrupt and intimidating. I meekly showed him my records of Rose seizing on that low dosage. He looked and paused, but said nothing. Her dosages were not changed. We went home. She had a long, strong seizure on the couch while the neighbors were visiting. I called back to the EMU, the dosages were raised immediately. I guess he did not want to be wrong until he was proved wrong. Nobody argues with paper.
Mama FLOW
Seizure Mama and Rose 