Oh, my aching body ....

My bruises continue to surface -- everywhere.

It's amazing to think that I could have thrashed about enough to acquire the amount of bruising I have and NOBODY in that household heard me.  I know it was early in the morning, and everyone  had had a very long day the day before, and with the exception of the absolute non-drinkers in the group, I expect they had consumed mucho vino.  It was, after all, a wedding.  John was not wearing his hearing aids while he slept (who does?) so he certainly wouldn't have heard anything.  The location of the bathroom didn't help either -- it was off at one end of the house, isolating me from everyone else really.

Back in 1988, when I experienced my first episodes of seizures, I was naturally put through the whole gamut of testing, including the dreaded angiogram.  They threaded a tube through my groin up to my brain and then shot hot oil all through my brain (at least that's what it felt like!)  Everything showed clear.  No tumours.  So my epilepsy was ruled "idiopathic" and in discussions with my neurologist at the time, he opined that I had probably been an epileptic all my life and it just hadn't been known because my seizures only occurred at night.  He also thought that the late onset of my seizures (I was 38 at the time) was hormone related.

An interesting theory that might support that is the fact that I was also a late bedwetter, not stopping until I was 12 years old.  That is also the age when my menses started.  I suppose that the nights I wet the bed could have been the nights I had seized (the bladder usually does eliminate during a seizure).  I remember often complaining that my sister must have been punching me during the night because I was mysteriously bruised.  The neurologist suggested that I was seizing; and the bruising was from thrashing about.  (Many years later, the pain management specialist explained that fibromyalgia is often a result of the injuries suffered during epileptic convulsions.)

The neurologist explained that the seizures may have stopped altogether when my menses started, and then had started again at that point in my life due to hormonal changes (menopause).  But we had no way of knowing that I had NOT been having seizures in the intervening years because my seizures were nocturnal and one needs witnesses to report what happened.  So the hormonal influence was just theory at that time, but I remember his saying that he was fairly certain of his diagnosis.

In 1988, it was determined that I have "nocturnal epilepsy" -- for some reason, when I'm sleeping, my brain misfires.  If I wake and try to call on my brain to perform too many tasks before it is fully awake, I risk having a seizure. I did not lose my driving privileges, because it was felt that unless I drove in my sleep, I was not at risk. In any event, since 1988, my seizures have been totally controlled.  So much so, that I truly had "forgotten" that I am an epileptic.

On the morning of October 4th, I woke to go pee, but I didn't really want to be awake yet; I was in a strange environment; it was dark (I am light-challenged); I was groping my way and looking for the light switch and trying to be quiet so as not to wake anyone.  I guess I exceeded the number of tasks my brain was able to process on that particular morning in those particular circumstances.  And with the long, stressful, physically demanding days, and short nights, that had preceded the event, not to mention the consumption of more wine than is normal for me (on two consecutive nights, no less) I had set the stage for the perfect storm.

But the question I have to ask is:  what has happened to alter my hormonal balance to cause my brain to become actively epileptic again, after all these years?  The only fly in the ointment is Cesamet.

Today, John will take me into Ottawa for my physiotherapy session.  She will have to be very selective about where the needles can be placed for this visit!

We will then go to visit a cousin of mine.  We've just discovered that she's been in hospital since last week so we'll drop by to see her before we head home.

I still can't do too much; I have to rest a lot more frequently than is usual even for me.

But we will press on ...