Well, I had the first maybe-absence-seizure in class yesterday.
The professor was talking, I was taking notes, and suddenly the professor was talking about some different facet on a different slide about the same general subject. Mid-sentence, as far as I remembered.
Which I’m sure isn’t right. That professor tends to be pretty coherent and organized, and she goes through her slides in order. The fact that it wasn’t the same slide in her Powerpoint is what decided me that yes, I really must have lost time. Again.
Blah.
This has just been a rough week. I’ve now had either 2 or 3 migraines (depending on whether you count a migraine returning circa 6 hours later as a second migraine) and 2 absence seizures since Thursday.
I am, at this point, seriously considering taking a medical withdrawal for this semester. This is not the first time I’ve been pushed to that point. Having accepted that it may be necessary has been kind of liberating; I’m not panicking about the reading that isn’t getting done because I can’t concentrate well enough to make sense of it. I just haven’t made the actual decision to pull the plug on this semester yet.
Oh bother, I just realized I haven’t told you guys about the appointment with the neurologist Friday.
There unfortunately isn’t much to report. They aren’t sure what it is. Maybe it’s absence seizures, but they don’t quite fit the profile – most of them are much too long. Maybe it’s some form of structural problem in the brain, but my MRI a little less than a year ago is clean. There’s some potential for it to be a problem with a blood vessel, the possibility of which becomes far more likely when you consider that I have family history of brain aneurysms. They’ll be doing a MRA – that is, a magnetic resonance angiogram, a map of the blood vessels. I’m also to have an EEG done, but they aren’t terribly hopeful about catching the activity as these things are only happening about twice a week.
The nuisance here is that I am not allowed to drive until we know what is going on, and they won’t have me back for 3 months. So here I am, stuck without being able to use my car, as my northern city slides into late fall and winter. I miss the temperate southern climes I grew up in, where frost was the worst you could expect on the coldest of mornings.
I feel for you. My son also has seizures, and lately has been having a new kind. Like your situation, they need to see what’s going on, so he’s going to stay in hospital for a week to be monitored. Seizures are awful, they take away your power over your body and mind.
Hope things improve.