Recapping the Seizures

Welcome back to the next Thriving Not Just Surviving Blog post.

I was hoping to use this post to briefly highlight the completion of round 1 of chemotherapy on February 7. It is true that I did complete round 1. However, on the evening of Saturday, February 9 I experienced 3 seizures as I was going to bed.

After laying down in bed I experienced an aura which is what a seizure patient sometimes experiences right before a seizure. For me it’s usually a déjà vu feeling, mind racing, and a familiar music or song playing through my mind. Overall, the aura can be very hard to describe, but it’s very important because it can help a seizure patient get to a safe place before the seizure occurs. In this situation it allowed me a few extra seconds to pull off my CPAP mask and lay back in bed before the minute-long seizure occurred.

After the first seizure ended there was a 15 second break and I experienced another 30 second seizure. With the help of my parents, Maureen was able to keep me from injuring myself during the seizures while my dad called the ambulance and my mom filmed the seizures. Ever since we were unable to record a seizure in the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit (EMU) our neurologist, who is also a trained epileptologist, has been wanting for us to record one of my seizures. A trained epileptologist can sometimes look at a video of a seizure and determine if the cause is epileptic or some other cause. We’re hoping that the videos we have will be good enough to make a determination.  

When I arrived at the hospital, they did a CT scan of my head and right after the scan I experienced another minute-long seizure. I struggled to breath during this seizure so they fitted me with an oxygen mask and moved me to the ICU where I spent the night. On Sunday I they performed a full brain MRI and I was seen by the neurologist who was working at the hospital. The MRI did not show any evidence of cancer or structural abnormalities that would have caused the seizures. These results were consistent with every other brain MRI I’ve undergone. On Monday I was discharged from the hospital.

It’s worth nothing that it had been 4 months to the day since my last round of seizures. It’s quite an accomplishment to make it 4 months between seizures, but it’s equally as frustrating. The silver lining is that these seizures were not nearly as severe. My shoulder did not sustain any damage and I am resuming my physical therapy this week.

We still don’t have a definitive answer yet to the cause of these seizures that have now been occurring for over a year now, but I think we are getting very close. That being said, I expect to continue with round 2 of chemotherapy on Thursday, February 28.