Mine will probably be the lamest of the thread: tunnel vision.
The weird thing about it was I still had my peripheral vision, it just wasn’t getting updated. I knew something was wrong, but only realized what it was when I stood in front of a mirror and waved with both hands.
I could only see one hand waving at a time. The other hand would look blurred, but static.
Morphine often makes me hallucinate. I was never quite sure if the following story ever happened or if it was a hallucination.
After a major operation my pain doc came in and the first thing he said was: If Anthony and Cleopatra had never met, how would the world be different. I paused to think, because I wasn’t sure if he had really said it, or if I hallucinated it. I finally settled on: I don’t know, what do you think? He just smiled and shook his head and left.
If it happened, I think it is an amusing thing to do with a patient on morphine and it entertains me to think it was a test or a joke. But I’m not sure.
Mushrooms. I saw our ceiling undulating. I realized it wasn’t really happening, yet I kept asking my gf (who had not eaten any) if the ceiling appeared to be undulating to her. She patiently answered me each time I asked.
Earliest time, I was probably 9 years old at the dentist. I have to be sedated at dentists, and between the sedation, and the gas I was tripping. I saw everything like a comic book - flat colors, outlined in black and the sounds repeated like the music in Baba O’Reiley.
I have a seizure disorder. Typically when I’m about to have one, my aura includes a song from the Muppets. Yes, the Muppets. And it’s one I can only remember when I’m about to have a seizure. And I unfortunately don’t remember how to talk then, so it’s not like I could tell my husband, “Hey, tell me what song this is!” It’s really aggravating. Imagine having a song on the tip of your tongue. Forever. Unless you’re about to experience an extremely painful, disorienting event.
Another thing - I can’t remember older movies because of my seizure disorder. This is actually a benefit, because every movie I saw between 1985 and 2000 is pretty much gone. I can remember my favorites before then and after. So if I see a movie that was made within that time frame, it’s like seeing it for the first time, though certain scenes will jar my memory and I’ll remember what happens as I go along. But what’s crazy is that it happens every time I see the movie. So, let’s say I see the movie Ghost. I don’t remember much about it, only that I don’t like it and the basic gist of the story. I’ll watch it, certain scenes trigger memories so I remember what happens during the rest of the movie. I’m done seeing it, and if I wait a few days or weeks, it’s gone again. Back to knowing I don’t like it and the gist of the story, maybe an additional scene or so. At least I’m a cheap date.
My only weird episode was this one where I was at work and I suddenly felt really strange. It’s hard to describe, but it felt like I was dreaming while I was awake - I even remember seeing a calendar, looking at the year (2004) and thinking “that doesn’t sound right.” It went away after an hour or two and has never happened since. I never did find out what happened.
I have epilepsy (god, how many times does this come up!), and when I have a seizure, I start to get this strange sense of deja vu, and then my thoughts start spinning* like someone put my mind into a blender. And then I start getting these weird smells (I can’t describe them, unfortunately), and I feel pins and needles all over my body. And then as it starts fading away, I get a panic attack. It’s scary as hell.
The thing is, even though my mind is confused, I’m still AWARE that I’m seizing, and it scares the hell out of me.
As for the big ones, I don’t remember them, so I can’t tell you. The only thing I know is that I wake up with a headache so severe I can’t even move and my mouth is all bitten up. And I’m usually confused and don’t remember where I’m at or what happened. I call these my “seizure hangovers” and I’ll usually be really out of it for a day or so.
The really freaky thing is that right after a big seizure is that I’ll get up, be coherant, but then I’ll go and lay down and go to sleep – but I’ll have no memory of it when I wake up. And I only know this because I’ve been told about it. Once after a seizure I woke up in my sister’s room and wondered what happened to my room and why everything was different (we switched rooms a few years ago).
Or one time I was able to type something on my computer over at LJ, and then I found it later and it made no sense.
giggle
*Remember the “shoehorn butterhorse” thread? That’s EXACTLY what my thoughts are like.
Seizures suck.
For a while I had panic attacks, they started out very similar to Guinistasia’s and overly’s seizures - mind spinning, deja vu, a song playing in my head I just can’t identify. But I’ve been told they were definitely panic attacks, not seizures. Who knows.
They’ve tailed off more or less, though I’m still averaging one every few months or so. Generally pretty mild, but still nasty.
I am also coming off of SSRIs. I have a low-level case of SSRI discontinuation syndrome - aka “The Zaps”. It’s like a cross between a mild static shock and the “dropping” sensation you get from bad turbulence in a plane. They occur at random times, with no particular impetus, and I might have one or I might have five or a dozen in a row. Most of the time I can overlook them, but sometimes they’re quite severe and I have to stop what I’m doing until the “attack” passes.
Interesting - did you actually bite your leg? I didn’t realize seizures caused THAT much contortion!!
Mine:
Age 11. Summertime. Woke early. Went back to bed for a bit more sleep. Woke up. Could. Not. Move. Finally managed to make a noise then all was well. Staggered out into the kitchen, where I scared the crap out of my mother by sitting down and bursting into hysterical tears of pure terror. Needless to say, I had rather a hard time falling asleep that night! Have learned this is sleep paralysis. It happened 2 or 3 times after that, but none were as terrifying as that.
First migraine, age 20ish. Walking down the street near college, and thought “Hey, that guy only has one arm!”. Realized he actually had two… I just couldn’t see both at once. The effect passed in 10ish minutes, but then the headache started. I’m fortunate that mine are not “shoot me now” severe, nor common.
Restless Legs Syndrome, which is neurological in origin but I originally thought was nerve damage from an minor cut (on my foot) that became infected. This one really sucks. Not saying it’s worse than frequent migraines - I gather those are truly horrible… but there’s not any really good treatment (all have side effects that are unpleasant). On rereading the OP, this isn’t a “mental episode”, however.
If failing to go to sleep promptly after taking a sleeping pill counts as a neurological episide, mine is (fortunately) somewhat funny. Don’t Roast And Post, kiddies!!
I had a concussion in sixth grade. The thing that surprised me most about it was that the center of my field of vision went blurry, sort of the opposite of tunnel vision. I couldn’t concentrate due to the pain and stomach upset. When I tried to do my penmanship, thinking that it was something that didn’t require thought, I couldn’t keep the letters on a stratght line.
I had the odd feeling that if I tried, I wouldn’t be able to say the word ‘talk’, which was a strange thing to think. I hadn’t been planning to say the word talk. That was kind of scary. And it still hurt and I couldn’t see how long until we got to go home because when I looked at the clock, the blur blocked it out.
I started weeping and the girl sitting next to me asked what was wrong. I told her I’d hit my head and it hurt and I couldn’t concentrate. I forget what else she asked, but at one point I answered that I’d been thinking that I couldn’t say the word ‘tpsxhxx’. The word ‘talk’ didn’t come out right. I tried a few more times and it came out a different wrong way each time. I could have said the word ‘speak’, but that wasn’t the point.
This freaked the girl out and she yelled for the teacher saying that I was crying and talking funny. The teacher already knew about the bang on the head, so after a couple of questions, he called my parents to come get me and we went straight to the doctor and, after some x-rays, to the hospital. I remember being wheeled into the hospital elevator in a wheelchair and then it was late afternoon the next day and I was in a hospital bed in the middle of talking to my visiting parents.
I hadn’t been out all that time. I’d answered questions and made a comment about some doctor’s tie. But the memory just wasn’t there.
Looking back, it seems really characteristic of me that I didn’t even consider asking to go home.
About 11 years ago I was having a very stressful time and one afternoon I lay down for a nap. I had the most vivid dream. It felt so real.
I was in the third grade, it was autumn and I was walking home from school. I stopped to turn rocks over to look for salamanders (the orange striped ones were my favorite.) I walked home and the smell of the fallen leaves and their crunch was so vivid. I walked in the back door and yelled “I’m home!”
Then I woke up and tears were just pouring from my eyes - but I could not tell you why, because I just felt so darn good! Really, I felt better than I had in ages, but the tears wouldn’t stop flowing either; they fell for at least 10 minutes.
It was a rather amazing experience - I could actually use one of those dreams today.
I recently was diagnosed with Vitamin B deficiency, and I could feel even before the doctor figured it out that my brain function was weakening in a non-specific way. (Plus it made me feel always tired and numb all over.)
But all of that went completely away within 24 hours of starting B complex supplements.
But I didn’t realize how much it had been hurting my brain’s functionality. Because when I started taking them, every object was so vivid to my mind. Not to my eyes. It’s like before the pills I was simply looking at a flat sheet, but afterward my post-visual processing was dividing the world up into objects again. It was actually annoying to have so much information in my brain for about a week.
I had percoset after dental surgery in college. I lay in bed and felt my arms and legs shrink and withdraw into my body until I was just a torso with a head. The phone rang. I made my roommate jump out of a bubble bath to answer it. After she hung up she stalked into my room demanding why I didn’t answer the phone. I told her that I can’t answer the phone with no arms or legs, dumbass.
Right now I am taking Topomax for migrains. One of the side effects is peculiar kind of speech/verbal aphasia. You know how you get that word, term, or name right on the tip of your tongue, but you just cant seem to bring it out? Yeah, its like that but so much worse and ALL. THE. TIME. No migrain, but now Im stupid. These are my choices?
[ol]
[li]Pseudoephedrine really messes me up. Back when I used to get a lot of sinus infections, it was the easiest drug to get and it helped a lot, but I almost hated it more than being all clogged up. I’d forget how to read analog clocks and I hallucinated a couple of times too. The one I remember was I was outside and some birds were flying high in the air, but I was convinced they were giant birds divebombing me, so I kept ducking and swatting at the air. The really weird part was that part of my brain knew what was really happening, but I kept freaking out anyway.[/li][li]Once, when I was nineteen or twenty, I got the flu and was feeling pretty crappy. I went into the kitchen to get some dinner and felt like I was going to pass out. I laid down on the dining room carpet until I felt better, talked with my mom a bit, got some dinner, went back to my room and woke up on the kitchen floor. Apparently, I had passed out and had a seizure because my potassium got too low and everything after I first walked into the kitchen was some kind of dream.[/li][li]I’m not sure if this qualifies, but it sounds kind of like the SSRI zaps, so here goes. Sometimes, when I’ve a short nap, I get this weird feeling. It feels like a puff of air pressure, like someone slammed a door nearby, but there’s no noise or anything, just the air puff. It’ll happen several times before it goes away and sometimes I can trigger them by moving my eyes the right way.[/li][li]I’ve had sleep paralysis so many times, that now I recognize it when it happens. I just focus really hard on moving my arm or something, until I bust out of it.[/li][li]My dreams are usually pretty vivid. Mostly just sight and sound, but I’ve had the occasional dream with touch or smell or even taste. For a few years, though, in high school and after, when I was sick and felt nauseous, I would dream in black and white. The B&W dreams were always set in some war, like Vietnam or WWII.[/li][li]Oh yeah, I had a couple of years where I had a lot of night terrors, too. One pretty awesome one was about aliens coming in the window. I jumped up and ran for the light switch and one of the aliens hit me in the back. I grabbed it, but it got my arm and we spun around for a bit, until I woke up enough to realize that my arm had fallen asleep and flopped against my back as I ran. Then I had grabbed my arm and spun around, thinking my arm was an alien.[/li][li]I get a lot of headaches and migraines, too, but nothing special unless you count the sensitivity to light and sound.[/li][li]This list is way too long.[/li][/ol]
After (during?) a triathlon once I developed an odd visual distortion.
It was an extreme effort, and at some point my central vision disappeared. It was exactly like a temporary blindness from looking too long at glare off a piece of glass, so I didn’t think too much about it.
But then, as my central vision came back, a ring of distortion around the original blind spot developed. Over the next couple of hours, the ring expanded to the edges of my vision and faded out as it did so.
There were no long-term effects that I’m aware of.
It does get better, so don’t despair. They probably won’t go away completely for a long time, but will diminish in strength until they’re less and less noticeable. Subtle little “poofs” contrasted with the jarring finger-in-an-electrical-socket sensation you get when you first quit.
The first time I quit SSRIs, I had the zaps full force, and it scared the crap out of me. Worse, my shrink had never heard of the symptom before, and probably thought I had simply lost my marbles (particularly when I tried to explain that moving my eyes triggered the bursts, but only lateral movement, and not up and down). It was still the Dark Ages before the WWW, and having no information resources available I assumed I had permanent brain damage. At least now the phenomenon is well-known, if not fully understood.
