Picture your kid blacking out for a few seconds at a time and nobody can tell you why. The doctor says the answer is five days hooked up to monitors and a camera, waiting to catch one of these episodes as it happens.
Until this year, that meant Minnesota or Colorado. A hotel room, time off work, somebody else’s kitchen, while you wait for a brain to misbehave on schedule.
Monument Health opened a two-bed epilepsy monitoring unit in Rapid City this year, the first of its kind in the region. Dr. Donald Barr, an epileptologist and neurology section chief at Monument Health, came on Doc Talk to walk through it.
He found Rapid City by accident
Barr grew up in California, did his residency in central Texas and a two-year epilepsy fellowship at the University of Miami. Then he took locums work, the physician version of a traveling nurse. He’d never heard of Rapid City until somebody pitched it to him and mentioned Mount Rushmore was close…