In this article, I am going to try and bring some awareness on Epilepsy.  I know a little about this as when I was in my early twenties I suddenly started having seizures after a night out with friends. It all started when I was in a night club one weekend, I was having a drink and went to the toilets and when I came back I finished my drink. After about ten minutes I started feeling dizzy and started to stagger around the place and this was only after two or three pints. My friends told me that the door supervisor took me out on the balcony and then he sat me down. The next thing I know I’m waking up in the hospital. I was informed that I had a seizure on the balcony of the night club and the door supervisor had called an ambulance as my friends had said that I had never had a seizure before.

I soon learned how to deal with the onset of seizures and how to reduce them.  Before I would have a seizure, I would start to feel angry over the slightest little thing and argue of silly things. Soon after this I would start to appear drunk and stagger everywhere. As I use to work in a hospital the nurses and some of the doctor would recognise what was happening to me and get me to a safe place and help me relax and if it was too far gone they would treat me with medication such as Diazepam. I learnt that getting into a quiet, darkened room and spray lavender where I was laying.

As it has been a while since I have had a seizure and it must have been over 14 years since I have had a seizure and been medication free for 13.5 years. I started to read about Epilepsy since then. I will put up some facts and figures on here but they may be a little dated so please don’t take what I write as fact, things change in time.

There is about 1,000,000- 2,500,000 people may develop epilepsy in their lifetime.

There is roughly about 250,000 – 500,000 with active epilepsy.

Each year there will be about 10,000 – 35,000 will develop epilepsy every year.

Epilepsy could occur due to an injury to the brain, whether it is due to a brain injury, Infection to the brain, Stress related incidents, Drugs and alcohol just to name a few reasons.

The brain works on electrical impulses that fire from nerve cell to nerve cell and at times due to whatever reason, they miss fire and don’t connect to the right cell. This courses a miss fire and this will make the body have an epileptic seizure.

There are roughly 40 different types of seizure with not one being the same, there is something different in each one no matter how small the difference is. It could range from one limb jerking differently of random involuntary movements. Every one’s seizures will be different to another’s even though two people may be diagnosed with the same Seizure type their seizures will be individual.

 

Partial Seizures

–    Simple partial seizures.

–    Complex partial seizures

–    Secondary generalised seizures.

Generalised Seizures

–    Absence seizures (petit mal)

–    Myoclonic seizures

–    Clonic Seizures

–    Tonic Seizures

–    Tonic-clonic seizures (grand mal)

–    Atonic seizures

Just because a person may have a seizure in their lifetime it does not mean that they have epilepsy. If someone has concerns about this they should go to their GP and talk to them about them. The person should keep a diary of when these events happen. It should contain when they started and finished, what happened during the seizures and how long it took to recover and hand this to the GP. You can request to be passed over to a specialist in Epilepsy as well.

If you do have seizures, don’t let it run your life. You can take full control or partial control of the seizures. If you do end up going to see the doctors he may send you for one of three scans, not to worry about this as they don’t hurt, they could be an MRI scan magnetic resonance imaging, A CT scan computed tomography or an EEG electroencephalograph.

For more information on Epilepsy, you could contact National Society for Epilepsy, British Epilepsy Association. You can also contact your local hospital for local groups and information on epilepsy.