Chapter 2 - Traces in the EEG
By 4:30 AM, Claire was tucked into a hospital bed on the neurological observation unit. Wires spanned across her scalp like a plastic web, wrapped neatly in a gauze bandage and connected to a portable EEG monitor. Eli lay in a specialized clear bassinet right beside her bed, hooked up to continuous cardiac and oxygen monitors that soft-beeped in a steady, reassuring rhythm.
Daniel sat in the armchair, holding Claire’s hand tight. The harsh fluorescent lighting of the room was dimmed, casting soft shadows across the walls.
“I’m so sorry, Claire,” Daniel whispered, pressing his lips against her knuckles. “I thought... I was so afraid you were losing your mind. I was afraid you might hurt him or yourself without meaning to. I should have seen that you were suffering.”
“I thought I was losing my mind too, Daniel,” Claire said softly, tears tracking through the dry milk stain on her collar. “When you look down at your baby and for three seconds he doesn't look like your baby... it’s the most horrific feeling in the world. You feel like a monster.”
The door opened quietly, and Dr. Maya Chen walked in accompanied by Dr. Varma, the duty neurologist. Dr. Varma pulled a rolling workstation into the room, its screen glowing with complex wavy lines.
“Good morning, Claire, Daniel,” Dr. Varma said warmly. “We’ve been monitoring your EEG baseline for the past hour while you tried to rest.”
“Did you find anything?” Daniel asked, leaning forward.
Dr. Varma turned the screen slightly toward them. “Look here at channel T3 and T4—these correspond to your left and right temporal lobes. See these sharp, spiked waveforms interrupting the normal rhythmic background? They occur every few minutes, particularly when your eyes close and you begin to drift off to sleep.”
“What are they?” Claire asked, her throat tight.
“They are epileptiform discharges,” Dr. Varma explained clearly. “Specifically, temporal lobe spikes. You are having frequent subclinical electrical disruptions in your brain. When several of these spikes bundle together, they trigger a focal seizure with impaired awareness. During those few seconds, your brain cannot process visual or auditory information correctly. When you snap out of it, your brain tries to fill in the missing seconds, creating profound perceptual distortions—making you feel as though Eli’s heart stopped or his appearance changed.”
Claire let out a long, ragged breath, resting her forehead against Daniel’s arm. “So I wasn't imagining it. My brain was skipping.”
“Yes,” Dr. Varma confirmed. “Extreme sleep deprivation following childbirth lowered your seizure threshold. But there’s still one puzzle piece missing.”
Maya stepped closer to Eli’s bassinet, looking at the pediatric telemetry strip printing slowly from the wall unit. “During the last hour, every time Claire experienced one of those temporal spikes on her EEG, Eli’s heart rate showed a brief, micro-second fluctuation. It drops from 145 to 110, then jumps right back up.”
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“Is that dangerous?” Daniel asked, panic rising in his voice again.
“We don't know yet,” Maya said frankly. “It could be that Eli is picking up on Claire’s sudden physiological shifts when she holds him—a sensory reaction. Or... there is something happening to both of them simultaneously. I’ve called in a pediatric cardiologist and a genetic specialist for first thing this morning.”
