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New to seizures
Fri, 04/08/2016 - 18:48Topic: Medication Issues
Last week I had my first seizure. It was a grand mal, my boyfriend said my face was turning blue, and at one point I was not breathing. It lasted for 3 minutes. I went to the ER, but they could not find anything wrong. After I had told them about my history of drug use in the past month (I had been to a festival and had taken LSD, MDMA "Molly", and Xanax two to three weeks prior to my seizure), my ER Doctor seemed to be under the impression I was just another 19 year old who wanted to get drugs. She even asked me what drug I had taken the night before because my pupils were large... I have naturally dilated pupils...The days before my seizure I was under a lot of stress because my boyfriend had broken his leg and had gone through surgery. Because of that I went 3 days with spotty sleeping (waking up every hour), and then 3 days with no sleep. Then my seizure happened. I had also lost about 15 pounds during the time, going from 118 to 103lbs. My neurologist has said they cannot definitively say the cause of my seizure, but that it was possibly a bad mixture of the previous drug use, lack of sleep, stress, and weight loss. I received a CT scan and it was normal. However, I just had an EEG on Tuesday and my doctor called yesterday telling me my results were abnormal and that I was being prescribed Keppra that day. I'm very weary and nervous to take this anti convulsant as I have read reviews where many people say it has made their quality of life worse. Should I be prescribed medicine even though I've only had one seizure? Also, I wasn't tired for my EEG like I was asked to be, could that effect the results and make them abnormal? I have an MRI on Monday... I don't want to take this drug if the first seizure was possibly the only seizure and then I could possibly have a bad effect from the Keppra. Please help!
The EEG is a brain wave test
Submitted by just_joe on Sat, 2016-04-09 - 16:15
The EEG is a brain wave test showing the electrical output coming from your brain. What the neurologists are wanting to find in them is abnormalities. A normal one shows them nothing. I had 20-25 different EEG's and they all came back normal. So the neurologists know WHERE they are comming from. The MRI is showing the brain itself and anything on it. That may show something different from a normal brain. With mine it showed scared brain tissue caused by a hemorrhage to my brain. It happened between 6-8 YOA. That is what cause my epilepsy. Which is why they want the MRI and will be looking for anything different. It could be a cell not formed right. Anything. Many people have their MRI's come back normal. Mine originally did. It was the EEG I fell asleep in that showed abnormalities and the neurologists looked closer at the MRI of the 1960's.Anybody can have a seizure, Yes there are one time affairs but the abnormalities tell more. If they see abnormalities in the EEG then yes you should be prescribes medication. Believe me most people in here don't want to take meds. I hate taking them for anything much less epilepsy but I have been for 50+ years.Keppra is becoming the go to medication for seizure control. It works well. Better then any of the other medications I have taken. I have been in drug studies for new medications so I do know how those side effects get listed down. I used their diaries to list anything different on any day I was taking the test medication.. Now to your reading reviews on medications. You will read them on almost every medication listed for almost everything. You might want to look at your over the counter meds too since they to have side effects. Seizure medications are not like aspirin or other meds in the store. Those are generally take it and it's gone a few hours. All of those reviews were posted by the people that got one of the side effects. Now understand that there are some people that will get a side effect and the numbers vary from 5-8% of the people taking it. Which means that 92-95% of the people taking that medication have had no problems with it and it is working like it should.Personally I have been taking Keppra for about 15 years and have had no problems with it. It not only reduced the number of seizures I was taking it also shortened the time in those seizures. My seizures were reduced from a few a week lasting 5-8 minutes long. To a seizure every 8 to 14 days lasting a few seconds. The recovery time went from 15-45 minutes and at times longer is now seconds. I can have one while discussing something with you and you would know nothing about it.You are on the site that can give you information in may ways. Use it.Please come back and let us know how things goJoe