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.

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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

One paper down, one to go, then some finals and a portfolio.

Going to start the paper tonight since it's due tomorrow night at midnight, but waiting for my coffee to get here via the lovely S.

Last night something weird happened to me.

This is the closest thing I could find to my experience, and it took a lot of sifting to even find that.
I don't know if this is what it was or not. I don't have health insurance so I can't find out until a) I have another "attack" and someone is smart enough to take me to ER or b) I have another attack and have health insurance and can go get checked out. Any residual traces of activity in my brain are gone now, and my memory is restored so there's really nothing that can be done at this point.

It wasn't fun. I was sitting at the computer, had just finished chatting with a friend on AIM, and was about to start my school work. Yesterday I was running on four hours of sleep because of insomnia the night before and had finished writing a paper earlier in the day, but I finished ahead of time, got it edited and turned in, and was sitting down to write two more discussion post entries for one of my online classes. I wasn't stressed, my stress level hadn't really been high at all except during the insomnia, and even then it wasn't what I would call bad.

I've blanked out before, once in 2009 right before a final. I always associated it with panic attacks, but after studying those symptoms last night, I don't know that they could really be called that. Yes, stress was a factor in 2009, but it wasn't this time. The first time I blanked out, there was also a lot of stress and anxiety following because the final was -that day-, and I made my then boyfriend read the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring to me to try to make the memories come back.

Both times it has been a feeling of losing everything all at once, or completely blanking out. The first time the stress gradually got worse and worse until something snapped and suddenly everything was all gone. This time I was just sitting at the computer completely relaxed, then there is some time in between in which I don't remember anything but I guess time must have passed, and then I was sitting at the computer wondering why I was there and what I had done that day and what I had done the day before and what had to be done the next day and why was I at my mom's house and why were any of us there and what had we all been doing. It was just all gone. I remember asking my mom all of those questions and some other ones and I just kept repeating the same ones. I went downstairs and sat on my mom's bed waiting for everything to come back because there was too much noise and stimulation upstairs and called S and let him know what was happening. I said some random stuff to him too, things I wouldn't normally say, and was repetitive. I checked my texts today that I had sent him and they were overly simplified and very repetitive and all I could remember was that I had an assignment due in two days but I didn't know what it was and that I had to work a few hours this morning.

Losing your memory is a scary thing. I wasn't afraid like the first time because I knew that things would get better if I just waited a couple of hours, but I got kinda shaky when I was waiting for it to all pass.

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So took a nap today because I didn't really get to catch up on sleep today and am still trying to wake up enough to write. Drinking some crappy coffee.

One more week of this and then I can read and play video games and go outside. Climbin' on my excite bike.

Labels: amnesia, anxiety, finals, memory, memory loss, sleep deprivation, stress, studying, transient global amnesia