Jessie Hall and her dog CarlieHall family struggles with serious disease afflicting daughter
By Erin Cooper
The Community News
When the Hall family took one final weekend trip before school started last August, they could never have imagined that their lives were about to change forever.
While sailing on Lake Texoma with friends, the group had taken a break for a short lunch in the middle of the lake. It was then that their youngest child, daughter Jessie, suffered a sudden attack that had never been witnessed before.
Jessie’s left eye and head began to jerk to the left, and her legs began to twitch. She was unresponsive to verbal commands from her family, but she did respond when touched on her hands and feet.
Her parents, Cris and Kristi, called 9-1-1 and a game warden met them in a speedboat, whisking Jessie and Cris to meet with another boat that housed paramedics. After taking her to a hospital on the Texas side of Lake Texoma, the Halls learned that Jessie had suffered a complex partial seizure that caused her to lose consciousness.
The Halls returned home to Aledo and had an appointment the following Monday at Cook Children's Medical Center in Fort Worth. The doctor agreed that Jessie had a seizure on the boat, and the closest diagnosis was a case of epilepsy.
However, Jessie could not officially be diagnosed with that disorder until she had suffered two additional seizures … or more. The Halls decided to forego putting her on anti-seizure medications immediately because they had often heard of cases where children will have just one seizure and never suffer another one.
The Halls were “certain” that Jessie would not suffer another episode.
The Halls, unfortunately, were wrong. Over the next several months, Jessie suffered additional seizures, each one worse than one before it. She began to have tremors in her left arm and it was happening almost constantly.
“It started around the end of October, first of November,” Kristi said. “Jessie’s hand was getting weaker, and her grandma noticed that. Then it would start to twitch and it just progressively got (worse). As soon as they saw that, they checked us right in.”
She underwent additional EEGs at Cook’s in Fort Worth and the results reported sleep-induced spikes in the front of her right brain lobe. By early December, Jessie’s hand and arm tremors were occurring 24 hours per day and she had begun to lose the use of both extremities. Cris and Kristi decided to get a second opinion from a doctor in Dallas.
That doctor suspected Encephalitis as the cause of Jessie’s tremors and seizures. The Halls immediately took Jessie back to Cook’s where she was admitted and administered more tests – this time a MRI and a PET Scan. A PET is a positron emission tomography scan that shows how organs and tissues inside the body are functioning. It is coordinated by colors, similar to a map that displays the storms in a weather forecast.
“That’s when the lesion first showed (on her right occipital lobe),” Cris said.
After the tests, Jessie was diagnosed with Focal Encephalitis on her right occipital lobe. The doctors prescribed anabolic steroids for seven weeks, and for the first several weeks, they seemed to be working. Jessie’s seizures ceased and the twitching in her arm had diminished a great deal. However, as the dosage of steroids diminished, Jessie’s symptoms returned – and so did her seizures.
To read Jessie's complete story, read the April 18, 2008 edition of The Community News.