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Long term effects of many grand mals in short period of time?

Fri, 01/30/2015 - 14:34

Hi everyone. I was diagnosed with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy when I was 15 years old. I'm now 24, and finished graduate school in August. My seizures were well controlled on lamictal with occasional breakthrough seizures. I had a lot of memory and concentration problems on lamictal which was manageable until grad school. So about a year ago I switched to Keppra to get through school. I was doing well on Keppra until November 2nd. I had about a seizure a week until thanksgiving when I went into status epilepticus twice, which had never happened. The following week I had probably had over 30 grand mal seizures and at least a hundred absence seizures which for the most part went away right after I began treatment for epilepsy. I also started having weird things where my eyes rolled up into my head with a facial twitch that I was not aware during. My doctor was unsure if they were complex partial seizures of some kind of absence seizure. After that week I had a seizure that lasted over 5 minutes so my boyfriend called an ambulance and I had a really hard time coming out of it. The hospital let me go home since they couldn't do anything other than give me Ativan and wait for a scheduled eeg. Not even 2 hours after I got home I had a seizure lasting over five minutes. Again an ambulance was called as the doctors recommended. After convulsing I stopped breathing which required cpr. All of this had never happened before. After that I began seizing until paramedics came and gave me Ativan. after this they admitted me me for five days until I could get back on a cocktail of lamictal, Dilantin, and trokendi and my seizures stopped for longer than 24 hours. Up until that point I was still having seizures off Ativan.

So fast forward almost 2 months to now. I've been unable to work because I am a social worker and it would be unethical to work with clients when I cant focus long enough to remember what they are saying. Everything is so incredibly fuzzy, I'm light headed, sleep most of the day, have no appetite. I'M happy to be seizure free but I have passed out twice being so dizzy. I'm off Dilantin and trokendi so I'm back on just lamictal. I feel like I've never recovered from all those seizures. This is all new to me. Has anyone had cognitive issues after a great deal of grand mals in a short period of time? I'm at a loss for what to do? I hate living off my family but there is no way I can even hold a part time job right now. I'm frustrated by inability to do anything. Also, I probably had 2 or 3 concussions in this time period.

 

 

Comments

What you have gone thru will

Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 2015-01-31 - 10:13
What you have gone thru will take time to gegt back to normal. Been ther done that. In my status epilepticus I was having 40 convulsive seizures an hour. There was no 911 back then and it took about 8 hours to get me to the hospital. The doctors brought me out only to have be go back in again.   

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