Epilepsy

Those of you who know me know that I have been battling seizures for about 3 years now. They are always nocturnal seizures, but they seem to be related in some fashion to my history of panic attacks, night starts, night terrors, and other things that point to epilepsy: seeing moving lights over top of things around me (usually at night), weird recurring tastes in my mouth, etc.

When I had several seizures, I went to see neurologists, and all of them pointed to epilepsy, but I've resisted them. I don't want to think of myself as epileptic, and have to admit that I might be. More to the point, I don't want to lose my license, or my ability to drive, especially at night, but frankly, I just don't want to admit that I have epilepsy, because it feels like admitting that I might be broken some how.

Well, McKenna's suffering from night terrors right now, and I'm having many bad nights of sleep, having many night terrors of my own when I do fall asleep. Some nights I don't even want to fall asleep, but rather think it would be better to stay awake all night then close my eyes and disturb Heather and keep having these attacks.

This evening, I started poking around on the internet again, and I found this article which discusses something called "autosomal dominant nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy", which, in the article, pretty much describes my own behavior, though the patient in the article's got a worse case than me.

I think I might be coming around to admitting that I do have epilepsy, and I need to treat it with medication, and, like the lady in the article, work on stress management. I do know that the times in my life when I was exercising and eating well and writing and my life seemed on track, I never had any issues. But the times when I've lost jobs, and now, having kids, and trying to figure out if we're going to move or not, it all puts a strain on my head, and something in there gets short-circuited, and boom, I have shitty nights.

I don't know. I'm going to make an appointment with a specialist at UPenn (yes, the same school that dickhead wrote me from, what can I say, it's a good hospital) and see if we can isolate this issue to indeed be "autosomal dominant nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy", or close this course of inquiry altogether.

Pray for me tonight. I'm going to bed now, and I could use some restful sleep.