Note: This is Excerpt #22 in Diane’s Diary. If you would like to read previous excerpts, you can find Diane’s Diary 1-21 here.
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This blog post is a continuation of Diane’s Diary #21 and this whole story starts in Diane’s Diary #19- "Flying to Florida to Film." The story is a summary of filming the first segment of the feature film in 2019. This is what we are up to now:
Kaitlyn’s neurologist, Dr. Zakaria spoke eloquently and from the heart. We were all blown away by what he shared with us and the little bit that we learned about epilepsy and treatment. Then, in order to capture B-roll* we joined Dr. Zakaria in his office — the real one where his computer is — and he was able to show us an MRI of Kaitlyn’s brain. WOW.
(The images here are NOT her scans.)
He explained that her seizures come out of nowhere. Kaitlyn’s mom told us that about a year and a half ago she stopped getting an aura which was a warning sign that she was going to have a seizure. Now they come on suddenly, which makes his job even more challenging. He also showed us her EKG when she had been hospitalized and how the post-seizure EKG differs from her normal EKG.
(Side note: this blog will be turned into a book when the film comes out and the book will have more details about what we learned during that conversation. I wouldn’t want to spoil the film here so I hope you stick with us until the film is created and released so we can all see the magic unfold on screen.)
I asked Dr. Zakaria why he thought a service dog would be a good fit for Kaitlyn and he shared some very promising information with us. He explained that these highly trained dogs could detect the change in her physiology through her scent via her sweat and alert her that she was about to have a seizure. There is so much potential here for Kaitlyn and others who suffer from seizures.
As soon as the doctor finished showing us the scans he got called into a meeting. We were hoping to get one more shot of him walking into his office, but we couldn’t find him, so we got the image of the front of the office with the sign with his name on it instead. Then it was time to leave.
(This meeting happened in October 2019. Kaitlyn’s mom Erin was already in touch with a service dog training organization. As I’m writing this post in October 2020, I recently spoke with the highly specialized dog trainers and what they do is very exciting. Will report on that in a future post.)
*When you watch a film it’s boring to watch one single shot of someone being interviewed. You need to have other scenes and images to show while the interviewee is speaking to give it a visual interest. So, the additional images that you capture to cut to are called B-roll.
**WATCH our most recent mini-documentary!**
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