Am I living with epilepsy?

Hi, I have had a diagnosis of PTSD for 9 years and I also have a diagnosis of autism (PDD-NOS). I’m writing this because I don’t know anyone, and it seems to be what other people do in this situation. Perhaps someone will find it interesting or helpful. In the last 5 years, I began passing out occasionally at night (every ~6 weeks). My parents would hear me flailing around in the hallway and would find me on the floor in the dark, moving and groaning, but completely unresponsive. This was also happening almost every morning soon after I woke up alone in the house. The only thing I sometimes remember before becoming unconscious is a 1/2 second of some of my muscles kicking and what I call ‘catastrophic nausea’. Really bad nausea. On waking again, I am so disoriented that I have to discover where my arms and legs are and wait several minutes before I can even push myself up onto my elbows. I once mentioned to my GP that I was becoming faint, but I otherwise ignored all this for a very long time and didn’t mention it to anyone. Anyway, I thought I was merely fainting and these episodes haven’t frightened me. Then it all changed. A year ago, my PTSD psychiatrist prescribed me Tegretol as a mood stabiliser. Since that time, everything changed with my episodes. In the year I’ve been taking Tegretol, my morning episodes went from occurring almost every single day, to two episodes in the whole year. My nighttime episodes to once in the whole year. However, I didn’t make the connection between my ‘fainting’ and the Tegretol. The nature of the episodes also changed. The last few left me physically injured, perhaps because I was no longer getting a 1/2 second warning. On one occasion I hit my head and tore the skin on my forehead so badly that an eyebrow was hanging off and the skin on my nose was torn upwards leaving my skull exposed. My parents came home to find me confused and bleeding. I ended up in the emergency room where the ER doctors made the possible connection between reduced episodes and Tegretol. They gave me several tests, increased my Tegretol dose as a precaution, stitched me up, and made the relevant appointments. More doctors is not something I particularly wanted, but I now have a fierce neurologist who said it could either be non-epileptic seizures (understandable given that I have PTSD), or it could be epilepsy. He spent much more time talking about epilepsy and seemed to be leaning towards it. He said he hadn’t seen or heard anything that would exclude epilepsy and told me not to drink, drive etc, none of which I do anyway. He basically said he doesn’t yet know what it is and has ordered a bunch of tests for me (EEG, MRI), then “we’ll take it from there”. Fair enough. Wether it’s non-epileptic seizures or epilepsy, beyond wanting it to be the correct one, I don’t honestly care which. I’ll go with whatever they decide. I’m very patient and believe that given enough time, whatever it is will eventually diagnose itself anyway. And if the increased dose of Tegretol rids me of the remaining episodes, then I can forget about it all and get on with my programming. Today I had an EEG at the hospital. The EEG people were working on a Sunday. The technician said that “the background was pretty normal”. I don’t know what “the background” is, but I’m very happy it’s normal. I’ll assume that if there’s a foreground, it was normal too.