Brian passes out!!

Brian was six months old the first time it happened.  I wasn't home.  Lee called 911.  Brian turned a very deep shade of blue and went limp.  They came and administered mouth-to-mouth and all was well again.  For a while.   It happened a few more times, but now that we knew what to do we were less frightened.

Then as the first year progressed, we took him to a variety of pediatric neurology specialists.  Finally, we got to see "The Man" at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.  He called it a "cyanotic breath holding attack" and blamed it on a missing "enzyme" in Brian's chemistry.  Hey, he's the expert and even he had only seen a dozen like Brian in his whole career.  (He was an old guy)

He said that if we left Brian alone when this happened, his body would have a slight "convulsion" and that this would "kick in" the breathing reflex automatically.  This would be a good thing and his body had to "learn" how to convulse.  But, if we kept up the "mouth-to-mouth" he wouldn't "learn."   It's a hard thing to just stand by and see your child go into a convulsion, but he said we would have to restrain ourselves and let his body "learn" this by itself.

What a trip!!  Just stand back and watch your child cry, then turn blue, then turn almost black, then have a convulsion (stiffening up like an iron bar) then pass out and fall to the ground limp.  THEN he was ok.  What followed was about three years of craziness.  Because of the "fall to the ground" part of that sequence, we had to be around to "ease" him to the ground so he didn't split his head open.

During those first three years he cried a lot.  Whenever he wanted something.  When he didn't want something.  Just for no special reason.  The doctors said we must pay no attention to the "passing out" episodes or they would become a "tool" for Brian to get whatever he wanted.  That's not so easy

Now we started looking like neglectful parent monsters.  In the store he would pass out because he wanted an ice cream (or something) and when we'd say "no" he'd go into his "thing."  We, dutifully, paid no attention to it (as we were told) but OTHER people observing this would get ashen and yell "He's turning blue!!  Do something!!"  We'd just say, "Oh, pay no attention.  That's just his way"  I'm surprised no one called the cops on us!!  This could happen as much as a dozen times a day.

It was not unusual at all for me to be in the back yard doing some gardening and for neighbors to see me stepping over his tiny, inert, body on the ground where he had passed out because I wouldn't let him use the big rake or something equally as dangerous.

At about 4 years old, when he began nursery school....it stopped.  Just like that!  We think that once he was in a social situation with enough other kids, it ceased to be a tool of any kind.

And he never did it again!!