Life with Anthony just became a little more difficult. I'm not referring to the ongoing pandemic, although we've certainly had our issues because of that; for instance, Anthony started to get violent at a grocery store early in the lockdown when I realized we weren't safely distanced from the cashier and attempted to move him back. Also, because of our experience with Anthony developing pneumonia without our realizing it, ensuring that we know how the virus spreads in various environments and then doing our best to adhere to that knowledge has been of utmost importance to us, but it's a tall order when there are expected interactions with others who may not feel the same way.

What just made life with Anthony more difficult in this instance was a seizure. Anthony has had seizures before, to be sure; some of them have been documented here and some have not. What made this one different was that it occurred not when he was sitting in a room, but rather standing in the shower. 

I have mentioned before that I shower with him each night; it's frankly easier for me than trying to give him a bath. I wash his hair, wash his face, and shave him, then proceed to wash my hair and face before moving on to wash the rest of Anthony. It was in the short time frame of washing my hair and face (with eyes closed, of course) that I heard what appeared to be Anthony slipping and falling outside of the tub. We have a non-slip mat in the tub, so I was surprised to hear that, but washed my face off as quickly as I could to be able to see, and then saw Anthony prone on the bathroom floor. 

At about the same time, my wife, daughter and other son rushed into the bathroom as well. I was attempting to crouch in the bathtub and pull the shower curtain around me so that my poor daughter wouldn't also have to deal with seeing her dad, but it was then that Anthony started the convulsions that we associate with seizures. Because of how he had fallen onto the floor, and because of a broken tub skirt that we still haven't replaced from his years of outbursts, I was trying to hold one of his feet above the tub, but his other was banging into tubing exposed under the whirlpool-type tub. That foot ended up with a fair amount of red marks on it, but, thankfully, no cuts. 

Fortunately, this seizure--at least the convulsion part of it--didn't last as long as some have. Once it was done and the others were tending to getting him covered as much as possible so he could rest there on the floor for a bit, I said that I would leave them to the task since I wasn't a lot of help anyway, and try to finish showering quickly. 

I was lucky that he didn't fall into me in the shower; there was no warning sound, so, if he had fallen in my direction, I would have been unprepared and likely have hurt myself badly as I fell into the faucet and wall. It also worked out well that, while he does have a red spot on his head, it appears that he didn't directly hit his head when he fell, and the convulsions may have started later than they have before. We have come to conclude that there seems to be a leaning forward that takes place before falling (with, perhaps, an associated brief loss of consciousness) that precedes the convulsions. We're glad, in this instance, that others had time to get there before they started. 

I had, in the past, indeed considered the possibility of Anthony having a seizure while taking a shower; I didn't consider it happening in the brief span of me having my eyes closed, and assumed that I would be able to catch him and get him down on the floor of the tub. But that didn't happen, so now I will be giving him a bath each night going forward. Since the tub is not large either, though, we are thinking about options for the long term. The spaces we have for bathtubs in our house are not big enough to remodel for someone who will convulse into a semi-rigid form, so we will probably need to more proactively look for opportunities to find or build a different house.