Epilepsy and getting a better night’s sleep

18 July 2018

Epilepsy and getting a better night’s sleep

18 July 2018

Louise recently contacted our Sleep Service for some advice to help 9-year-old Jonah get a good night’s sleep. Jonah has recently been diagnosed with frontal lobe epilepsy and Louise told us their story.

Jonah has never been a great sleeper and not having a good night’s sleep just became a normal part of life for our family.

For a while we were trying to push him to sleep in his own room but then we starting noticing that something wasn’t quite right. He was making strange, rhythmic movements in his sleep.

We saw Jonah’s GP who told us to keep an eye on it but it steadily got worse. He would be waking up 3-5 times a night and this eventually developed into dystonic posturing – his right arm would go in the air and his leg would go stiff.

We started filming Jonah at night so that we could show the GP that his condition was worsening and of course, having so many seizures every night meant that none of us were getting much sleep. It was taking a toll on all of us and I began to feel extremely guilty about having tried to make him sleep in his own room when he’d been having seizures all along.

By February 2018, Jonah had been referred to an epilepsy specialist and we finally had enough evidence to show that Jonah was getting worse and they were able to diagnose him from this. They put Jonah on medication to help manage his seizures and he responded straight away which was great but it made him very tired in the day. This wasn’t helped by the fact that he still wasn’t settling well and he still didn’t want to be in his own room – part of me still wanted to keep an eye on him in case he had a seizure.

That’s when a friend suggested that we contact Cerebra’s Sleep Service for support. We received our sleep pack and immediately started using some of the tips that were in there.

Self-settling was the most important thing for us to get Jonah into the habit of doing because it meant that we wouldn’t have to intervene if he did wake in the night – he would just settle himself. We used the gradual withdrawal method to so that it was a gentler process for both us and Jonah and if he woke up during the night, we would just take him straight back to his room.

I first noticed an improvement about two and a half weeks in when Jonah got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and took himself straight back to bed. We were thrilled!

We’re now six months down the line and the change in not just Jonah but the whole family is unbelievable. I had been finding it more and more difficult to function in work because of the lack of sleep but now I’m doing much better and Jonah is also doing much better at school because he is now able to concentrate much better. We’re even moving him into his own big bedroom.

The Cerebra Sleep Service has been great because a lot of the sleep advice you usually find is for much younger children, but their advice really helped not just Jonah but the whole family finally get a good night’s sleep!

You can find out more about our Sleep Service and the support we offer here.

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