Advocating for Avery Joy By Abby Meaux Conques
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very Joy was just three months old when she began having seizures. Her Mom, Abbey Benjamin, explained that doctors diagnosed her daughter with epilepsy and that even though she left heart-wrenching doctor appointments with prescriptions for epilepsy drugs which seemed to help, they only helped for a year. “They stopped for a year, but came back and never left,” Benjamin said. No stranger to the medical field, Abbey is a former pediatric nurse, now working in hospice, from Monroe, Louisiana. When Avery Joy's seizures started up again, Abbey and husband, Christopher, began a crusade to find something to help their daughter. “At one point she was on four different medications. Her seizures would sometimes last up to 20 minutes at a time,” she explained. Abbey explained that two of the medicines that Avery Joy was on were meant as rescue medicines, but neither of them pulled her out of seizures well. Abbey describes the next few years as a ‘long-time medicine journey” trying varying medicines in different combinations. The search for medicines led their family to a doctor who suggested vagal nerve surgery. “We didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “We were just trying everything we were told to do.”
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