Epilepsy unit saves time, money, hassle

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As a registered nurse working in the new adult epilepsy monitoring unit at Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis, Connie Prudhomme is well aware of the benefits it will provide.

Prudhomme’s son, Michael Anderson, was diagnosed with epilepsy in the mid-1990s. Until Baptist’s unit opened in midAugust, a trip to Nashville was required to get the services he needed.

“So we ended up going to Vanderbilt, going to Nashville, which is hard in terms of taking time off work, hotel stay, extra food ...,” Prudhomme said. “Getting care out of town four hours away is a hardship.”

At the new Memphis facility, patients are weaned from medications, have sensors placed on their scalp and are monitored continuously by camera, by technicians watching computer screens for electrical brain activity and by nurses at a station signaled by alarms.

For three to seven days, patients wait in their beds or sit in bedside chairs waiting for seizures that can be recorded and mapped.

Dr. Pawan Rawal, a neurologist with Baptist Medical Group recruited to lead a comprehensive epilepsy program, said that epilepsy monitoring units are considered the “gold standard” of epilepsy care.

Still, national studies have shown that people may delay that step for as much as a decade, in part because of lack of availability, Rawal said. He said an estimated one in 10 people in Tennessee will have a seizure at some point in their lives.

“So we are hoping that with this unit up and running, we can shorten the time period for people in Memphis and surrounding areas,” he said.

Rawal, 32, evaluates patients at an epilepsy clinic on the hospital’s campus to determine whether they should check in to the four-bed epilepsy monitoring unit.

National guidelines recommend that every patient who has two or more medications for seizures, or who has seizures but is unsure what part of the

brain they are rooted in, should be evaluated at a monitoring unit as quickly as possible, he said.

Family members are encouraged to provide support while education, social work and other support are provided, said Julie Horn, nursing neurosciences and stroke coordinator.

“Really our goal is to monitor the patients to keep them safe while they are here in our care, to keep them occupied,” Horn said.

Medication can control seizures for two of every three patients who seek care, Rawal said. Medical devices that use electrical energy to stimulate the brain or surgery are options for others.

Prudhomme said that her son, now 31, has had surgery to remove part of the right temporal lobe of his brain that wasn’t successful. More medications and a nerve stimulation device known as a “pacemaker for the brain” followed.

“He’s doing better now than he used to, but as a mother trying to figure out where there is help, with my experience there is not a lot of help offered — it was give more medicine, give more medicine,” Prudhomme said.

An emergency room nurse at the hospital for 18 years, she said she wanted to be part of Baptist’s epilepsy monitoring unit when the opportunity arose. Her son, she said, is also a volunteer there.