Tag: awareness

Unfortunately, my streak of fifteen years seizure-free ended earlier this year. I started having small seizures in college that were misdiagnosed as icepick migraine headaches, which meant I didn’t receive treatment for epilepsy until I was having blackouts a year after graduation.

On July 9th, I had three seizures that were smaller versions of the ones in college. (I’m pretty sure these weren’t icepick migraines, either.) So now the doctor and I are making adjustments to the medications I’ve been taking for a decade and a half, which makes sense. Over time, our bodies get acclimated to the treatment and it doesn’t work as well. It’s the same reason why I started having seizures in college: I started taking Dilantin in 9th grade and its effectiveness decreased through high school and college. The plan this time was to increase the dosage of one (Lamictal) and maintain the other (Depakote). The plan is already not working.

I imagine this is a situation a lot of other people with epilepsy have gone through: a change in medication that should have worked—it was a great plan on paper—and it made the problem worse. The seizures haven’t been as strong, but they’ve been much more frequent. Every few days instead of every few months. Which raises the best question in the world (even better than “Does this make me look fat?”): What now?

November is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I’d like to be consistent and focused enough to write 50,000 words in here during the next couple weeks, but I’m aiming for at least something each day. If I can’t, I can’t, but even Day 2 is more than the last year and a half, so I think I’m already doing a great job.

I was officially diagnosed with epilepsy in 2000 and we found a good medication combination to treat them by the beginning of 2002. I’d been having blackouts every few months (during those times, I’d function relatively normally—I even told my mother how to recognize if I was having a blackout while having one). Over fifteen years without seizures has been a true blessing, one that only some people with epilepsy receive. Some find medications that reduce their seizures to two or three a day and that’s as good as it gets. I sometimes take my situation for granted, but I should always remember how fortunate I’ve been that my epilepsy has been controlled and it’s not creating limits for me. I can drive, I can travel, I can run errands on my own. Many, many things that are simple and average and completely normal, yet also blessings.

There is plenty that I can write about this topic, but I wanted to start out by making sure I had changed the name of the category “Head Case” to “Epilepsy.” It was kind of a cute pun when I thought of it—a clever play on words, hee hee hee—but epilepsy isn’t a joke. It’s a condition that one in 26 people have, which is why I posted a link to the website below. Plus if you take the time to watch the video, you might see someone familiar. And you might see me in it, too.

onein26.org