break the silence
melodies
long gone
Saturday, February 18, 2012
I had another amnesia episode on Thursday night.
Everything was completely normal. Unstressed. I had just re-activated my Facebook (something I'm still not sure I should have done) after a couple of months of it being turned off, and was scrolling through the feed. I clicked on someone's profile and was scrolling down their feed, looking at their pictures and thinking, "Aww, she looks nice there," and then everything went blank. I started crying uncontrollably, which freaked me out even more, and didn't really think any thing at all, I just felt afraid. After a few minutes I was still crying and then started to notice my surroundings.
I recognize this place but why am I here right now?
It wasn't as confusing as the time before, but it still left me bewildered. I didn't feel anxious or scared like before, but I felt overwhelmed. I didn't know why I was crying or what I had done or where I had been that day before right then. I went to Seth's room after awhile and tried to wake him up because I remembered what his dad had said about traces of brain activity only being able to be detected for a day or so after the episode, but he wasn't completely understanding what was going on and told me to go back to sleep, and I wasn't sure enough about going to the emergency room to make him wake up.
A friend texted me during this, just answering something from earlier in the day, and I remember trying to explain what was going on to him, but it probably didn't make much sense because I couldn't make words work very well. I emailed my other friend during the thing and she got online and messaged me, which was probably garbled too since I don't really remember much of it.
Yesterday I went into work at 1 and was supposed to work until 9, but left after an hour because I felt really disoriented. I felt hungover from too much sleep that morning, but as I was driving to work I started to feel really out of it and by the time I got to work and had to deal with the phone constantly ringing and stylists giving me multiple tasks, I couldn't cope anymore, or at least not do my job well, so I told my boss what happened and she excused me to go to the doctor.
The same friend whom had texted me the night before picked me up and we drove to Houston, to my school's clinic. I knew that they didn't have the equipment to run any tests, but at that point I wasn't sure if I should risk going to the ER and potentially wasting a whole bunch of money or going home and not feeling better, but the doctor listened to me and told me I was right to forgo the ER since they didn't have the equipment to run the tests that needed to be run either. Her advice was that I see a neurologist as soon as I can get on some kind of health insurance, or to change my address to my mom's so I can get benefits of some kind, and she told me she suspected complex partial seizures based on my symptoms.
://///
The more I looked into it, the more it made sense. Even the crying part. And the fight-or-flight fear the second time. Since the focal point changes in the brain, the affects can change each time. I felt like I swallowed my cog psych textbook after finding that out. All of those things I learned last semester suddenly felt very real. Then I learned that having more than one seizure qualifies you as epileptic.
All I know about epilepsy is that that one Pokemon episode caused a bunch of Japanese kids to have seizures, that there is a graphic novel I tried to read once but couldn't get into about it, and that that crazy lady in the Bible was healed of it.
Yeaaaah. :/
Nothing is for certain yet, but this seems probable. People don't just get amnesia multiple times for no reason. And the crying thing, when I didn't even know why I was crying and wasn't feeling hormonal or depressed, that's what really drove it home. The way the doctor looked at me was like, hey you-- this isn't normal. This is serious business.
So I guess I am waiting now, until I have a means to schedule an appointment and get tested. I let the people that are around me most know about it, just in case I happened to be driving at the time and they were there. I don't like that the last two were a couple of months apart, while the gap between the first and second was years. I hope that they don't get more frequent.
Today I still feel tired, but not as out of it as yesterday. I still feel a little off but am feeling a lot better. Just trying to get lots of sleep. This last one didn't hit me as hard during the episode as much as the others, but the after affects were much worse. I remember the whole time it was happening, my mouth was hanging wide open the whole time, for a few minutes or thirty minutes, I don't remember, and I didn't notice it until I was starting to come back, and even then it wasn't enough for me to do anything about it.
Everything was completely normal. Unstressed. I had just re-activated my Facebook (something I'm still not sure I should have done) after a couple of months of it being turned off, and was scrolling through the feed. I clicked on someone's profile and was scrolling down their feed, looking at their pictures and thinking, "Aww, she looks nice there," and then everything went blank. I started crying uncontrollably, which freaked me out even more, and didn't really think any thing at all, I just felt afraid. After a few minutes I was still crying and then started to notice my surroundings.
I recognize this place but why am I here right now?
It wasn't as confusing as the time before, but it still left me bewildered. I didn't feel anxious or scared like before, but I felt overwhelmed. I didn't know why I was crying or what I had done or where I had been that day before right then. I went to Seth's room after awhile and tried to wake him up because I remembered what his dad had said about traces of brain activity only being able to be detected for a day or so after the episode, but he wasn't completely understanding what was going on and told me to go back to sleep, and I wasn't sure enough about going to the emergency room to make him wake up.
A friend texted me during this, just answering something from earlier in the day, and I remember trying to explain what was going on to him, but it probably didn't make much sense because I couldn't make words work very well. I emailed my other friend during the thing and she got online and messaged me, which was probably garbled too since I don't really remember much of it.
Yesterday I went into work at 1 and was supposed to work until 9, but left after an hour because I felt really disoriented. I felt hungover from too much sleep that morning, but as I was driving to work I started to feel really out of it and by the time I got to work and had to deal with the phone constantly ringing and stylists giving me multiple tasks, I couldn't cope anymore, or at least not do my job well, so I told my boss what happened and she excused me to go to the doctor.
The same friend whom had texted me the night before picked me up and we drove to Houston, to my school's clinic. I knew that they didn't have the equipment to run any tests, but at that point I wasn't sure if I should risk going to the ER and potentially wasting a whole bunch of money or going home and not feeling better, but the doctor listened to me and told me I was right to forgo the ER since they didn't have the equipment to run the tests that needed to be run either. Her advice was that I see a neurologist as soon as I can get on some kind of health insurance, or to change my address to my mom's so I can get benefits of some kind, and she told me she suspected complex partial seizures based on my symptoms.
://///
The more I looked into it, the more it made sense. Even the crying part. And the fight-or-flight fear the second time. Since the focal point changes in the brain, the affects can change each time. I felt like I swallowed my cog psych textbook after finding that out. All of those things I learned last semester suddenly felt very real. Then I learned that having more than one seizure qualifies you as epileptic.
All I know about epilepsy is that that one Pokemon episode caused a bunch of Japanese kids to have seizures, that there is a graphic novel I tried to read once but couldn't get into about it, and that that crazy lady in the Bible was healed of it.
Yeaaaah. :/
Nothing is for certain yet, but this seems probable. People don't just get amnesia multiple times for no reason. And the crying thing, when I didn't even know why I was crying and wasn't feeling hormonal or depressed, that's what really drove it home. The way the doctor looked at me was like, hey you-- this isn't normal. This is serious business.
So I guess I am waiting now, until I have a means to schedule an appointment and get tested. I let the people that are around me most know about it, just in case I happened to be driving at the time and they were there. I don't like that the last two were a couple of months apart, while the gap between the first and second was years. I hope that they don't get more frequent.
Today I still feel tired, but not as out of it as yesterday. I still feel a little off but am feeling a lot better. Just trying to get lots of sleep. This last one didn't hit me as hard during the episode as much as the others, but the after affects were much worse. I remember the whole time it was happening, my mouth was hanging wide open the whole time, for a few minutes or thirty minutes, I don't remember, and I didn't notice it until I was starting to come back, and even then it wasn't enough for me to do anything about it.
Labels: amnesia, complex partial seizure, diagnosis, epilepsy, health, neurons, no insurance, psychology, seizure
11:27 PM