How The Ice Pack Eases Post-Ictal (dramatically!)

Those of you who are all too familiar with grand-mals, know that the post-ictal can be just as much, if not more of a nightmare than the grand-mal itself.

Henry's first grand-mal here, we did not know about the ice pack trick yet. I was stunned by how horrible the post-ictal was. Henry was running full force in the house. It was all I could do to direct him to the backyard. There he cont'd to run. Mind you, he's about 90% greyhound, and runs like one! For over an hour, Henry ran full force in the backyard.

He was not blind, but his brain did not compute how close things were in front of him, so he would smack into the garage full force, then turn around and run smack in to the fence full force, and so on and on. I stood there at 3 am, in the snow, in nothing but a long parka, undies and shoes, crying as I watched him go through this. It was awful. Words cant explain how awful.

When I brought him in the house, he was still pretty crazy, jumping up onto the counters and such, very non-typical of Henry. He also kept getting caught in multiple dead ends around the house, and cont'd to act blind till the next day. It was horrible!

Anyways, I posted at greytalk, and told them all about it. One lady explained to me, that the body overheats while seizing. The post-ictal pacing/running is their way of cooling down, and is necessary. I guess it's like, if you or I do a real tough workout, we cant just stop abruptly in the middle. We need to do cool down exercises. You have to understand, the body *dramatically* overheats during a seizure, more than any workout could overheat us. So while it may seem hard to believe that frantic running is 'cooling down', it really is, compared to the grand-mal.

This is my non-educated theory on why the ice pack so drastically reduces the post-ictal~ When I use the ice-pack on Henry, the violent crazy shaking all over part of the seizure abruptly stops. Without the ice pack, he'd go on and do that for several minutes. With the ice pack, he only does that as long as it takes me to get the ice-pack. Which is usually a matter of seconds. The faster I get the ice-pack, the easier the post-ictal is. I believe this is because the ice pack stops the overheating part, by abruptly stopping the violent shaking part, thus, there is less of a need for them to cool down.