Friday 16th March, 2018 This will always be an important date to me. It is the date my courageous, beautiful daughter (I'm not talking about looks here but the essence of who Ashleigh is) had a section of her brain surgically removed by choice. To her though, I don't think she felt it was a choice. If she wanted a chance of a future that she had some choices and ability to plan for, without epilepsy taking over and getting in the way, then she needed to do it. Dr William Bingaman is the Neurosurgeon who completed Ashleigh's surgeries. Ashleigh took to him straight away. He is a joker and a confident man but he also really wanted to understand Ashleigh to see if she could cope with this. He loves getting her fired up abut sport. Dr Imad Najm is the Epileptologist who the Director of the Epilepsy Unit here at The Cleveland Clinic. He is who first accepted Ashleigh coming over here and has been in charge of her case. He said they are all very excited by the pos
This is going to be a very short post and my apologies if I'm not getting this right with the blog - it's not something I've done before this experience. I can honestly say that the last week has been one of the hardest of my life. Ashleigh was good for the first two days after surgery and it blew me away just how well she could function after what had been done. She was off all epilepsy medication from Thursday morning. Apparently it is completely normal not to seize for a number of days after electrodes have been implanted. From early Saturday morning (about 2 am) Ashleigh started experiencing pain. There were periods she was good but then the pain would come again. She talked about it being an 8 on a scale from 1 - 10. She started seizing on Monday night and had 5 in 24 hours. After 2 they put her back on her epilepsy medications. On Tuesday they came and did a stimulation test to see what part of her would be affected by removing the part of the brain wher