LEARNING ABOUT YOUR EPILEPTIC SEIZURES
Posted: under Epilepsy.
Seizures do not always occur at random. They are intimately related to how you feel, what you are doing, and what you are thinking. Most people with epilepsy will tell you that there are situations in which seizures are likely to occur, and others in which they seem to get fewer seizures, or even to be seizure free. You may have learnt that you tend to have seizures if you do not get enough sleep, for example, or if you miss meals so that your blood sugar level is low. For some people, flickering lights often cause seizures.
Many people have fewer seizures on holiday, or when their interest is held, as at the theatre. Others find that a peaceful, low-key life style, without too much excitement or novelty, helps keep them seizure free. One study of adolescents found (perhaps not surprisingly) that they were far more likely to have a seizure if they were helping around the home than if they were relaxing by the fire.
THOUGHTS AND SEIZURES
Stress and other emotions are not the only factors which seem to influence the generation of seizures. If you have complex partial seizures activity in the nerve cells around the damaged area of brain from which seizures arise may be sufficient to start a seizure. Some seizures can sometimes be triggered by a particular mental process: doing mental arithmetic, for example. If seizures start in the part of the brain that is involved in mathematical calculations, for example, then adding or subtracting figures may precipitate a seizure. Some people find they have a seizure when they think sad thoughts, or feel angry or even (as in Marion’s case, quoted above) when they feel guilty. In some people a seizure may be triggered when they are imagining three-dimensional objects: thinking about diagrams or planning moves in a chess game. One man, a motor mechanic, reported that he often had a seizure when he was tightening a nut in an inaccessible part of an engine; because he could not actually see the nut, he had to visualize what he was doing as he did it.
People who have seizures will often tell you that they have discovered they can stop a seizure, or prevent it spreading, by some mental or physical trick they have discovered, usually by accident or trial and error. When patients in an epilepsy outpatient clinic were asked about whether they had some mental strategy which helped inhibit their seizures, more than a third said that they had. They were not always successful, but most found that they could at least reduce the number of seizures they had.
The essence of many of these methods is distraction – turning your attention right away from the area of the body in which the seizure starts. It may help just to start thinking about something else, or to stop whatever it is you are doing and do something different. Often some quite simple trick helps to focus your attention elsewhere; some people like to have an elastic band around their wrist which they can tweak when they are aware that a seizure is beginning. Twisting a ring on your finger or an ear-ring in your ear for a few minutes can have the same effect. If your seizures usually start with the movement of a particular limb, holding the limb still to prevent movement may inhibit the seizure.
Not everyone has the same trigger-factors. But if you can work out which your personal trigger-factors are, then you may be able to develop strategies to avoid them or reduce their frequency by altering your behaviour.
Some of the self-help methods described in this chapter depend on being able to recognize the warning or aura which indicates that a seizure may be going to occur. These methods will not work for you if you have generalized seizures which come out of the blue, with no warning or aura. But whatever kind of seizures you have, looking at them in the context of your whole life, and learning to modify your life style and avoid situations which you know are likely to precipitate a seizure will be helpful.
*47\193\2*
