In reading up on epilepsy, I’ve come across lectures and interviews given by the neurologist V. S. Ramachandran (at UC San Diego), and he’s talked extensively about the spiritual experiences that some people with temporal lobe epilepsy undergo:
I attended this lecture! (I went to UCSD). I also read a really good article in a med journal about the relationship between seizures and belief in the paranormal (ghosties, UFOs, and so on). I wish I could find it again.
My seizures were most likely drug-provoked (I was taking two of the RXs on the “lowers seizure threshold” list at the time). However, I did have a few things occur shortly before that could have been auras/signals. The first was this really odd sense that my tongue was swelling and grew to the size of the bedroom (difficult to describe, but it happened a few times the day before the seizures). [SIZE=“1”]Also, embarrassingly, I wet the bed the night before :mad:. Some of the literature suggests this as an aura/symptom.[/SIZE]
Honey, for all we know, that is exactly what a spiritual experience IS. Don’t discount/dismiss it like that. The way dogs and bats can hear sounds that our brains cannot, or the way some colors are imperceptible by our brains…maybe these “misfirings” enable the brain to perceive something that’s always there but outside normal perception. Not saying that’s true, but it might be. One thing I am sure of: there’s plenty about the brain and about this world that we do not understand.
That “swelling tongue” thing makes me think of “Alice in Wonderland” syndrome, which I also experience from time to time, since I was a kid. It’s associated with migraines - which can sometimes occur with an aura, and with no actual headache.
I had seizures over a period of about 2 years, while I was pregnant, and am on Tegretol now. Haven’t had a seizure since Dec 2009. But the more I read about it all, the more I’m thinking I just had/have “migraines with aura”, rather than full on epilepsy. I had 2 MRI’s, but nothing conclusive was ever found - the doctor just said that because the seizures stopped after I started taking Tegretol, that was enough to convince him that I had epilepsy.
QtM, any thoughts on any of that? (Or anyone else ever hear about that?)
I will say, the more reading I do, the more I realize that the brain is very, very complex, and there’s more we don’t know about it … kind of scary!
This is intriguing and an excellent description of this sensation . . . I’ll have to see if there is some kind of physical happening that follows on my “swelling tongue” (I also have migraines, the “dagger through the right eye” type). I’m hyper-vigilant right now about anything that could be a seizure aura (Wait? Has my left big toe always felt tingly when I put my foot that way - LOL).
I have done a lot of reading about epilepsy comorbidities, and migraine comes up often. I’m not a doctor (well I am, but the useless kind), so QtM might be able to weigh in if this is a valid connection.
Well, fortunately, I’ve got them under control now – I haven’t had one in about three years! I’m not going to fool myself though into thinking they’re cured. I still have myoclonus, for one.
Plus, it’s always possible I could have one if say, I were to get the flu because whenever I’ve had a fever, I’ve gotten one. So, you never know. Epilepsy is a weird disease. (I didn’t even start having seizures until I was in my late 20s)
I’m neither QtM nor any other kind of medical person. Some drugs can lower your seizure threshold, and make a pre-existing tendency likelier to happen.
My older nephew has fairly significant autism, along with absence seizures. A year or so back, he suddenly decided that absence seizures were for sissies, and Real Men have full-on tonic-clonic ones.
His slightly younger brother, not autistic and with zero history of seizures, was put on a cocktail of antidepressants around then. He’d just been through a course of electroconvulsive therapy (the depression had been truly untractable, which was why they resorted to that). He’d just gotten his driver’s license and managed to inflict serious damage by hitting some parked cars. The policeman who took the report told my brother, when he arrived, that my nephew was acting almost as if he’d had a seizure.
With no history, my brother dismissed this idea.
3 days later, tonic-clonic, right in the middle of a restaurant.
Supposedly, this is completely unrelated to the ECT (per the neurologists and Doctor Google) - but rather, the medications lowering his seizure threshold.
With his emotional issues and the genetics at play, my WAG is the combination of the two.
All that is a long-winded way of suggesting that maybe you’d be at risk, if you’re on other drugs that can also lower the seizure threshold. So, something to discuss with the doctor(s) whenever they tweak your medications.
Sensation of swollen tongue is not uncommon, and typically represents a “jacksonian march” of brain depolarization over the region of the brain responsible for tongue sensation. The tongue is richly enervated and a correspondingly large portion of both sensory and motor cortex is given over to sensing/controlling the tongue.
I’m not going to fool myself though into thinking they’re cured. I still have 