Hi Robbe :hello:
First of all, I'm sorry to hear that you've had this experience, and the diagnosis. I hope you're not feeling too down about it, it must have come as a real shock.
Now for a little personal opinion, which you can take or leave as you see fit. I actually think they were very quick to make a diagnosis of epilepsy; I assume this was on the basis of finding some eeg abnormalities. (Do you know exactly what the Eeg discovered by the way? Some people on here seem quite knowledgable about Eeg interpretation and may be able to help explain things to you.) I'm not a doctor and am not going to claim to be an expert on this, or to say that they made the wrong decision - but I do feel that there would be nothing wrong with doing some more work to rule other possible causes out. At the moment you're in the position of being on powerful seizure control medications for an uncertain period of time and having your life restricted in various ways due to the medication and your diagnosis, on the basis of having experienced a single seizure (I'm not really sure how severe the seizure was from your description, would you mind giving more details?) and no other epilleptoform symptoms that you've mentioned.
It's entirely possible that you have epilepsy, but seizures can also have other causes besides epilepsy; and also a seizure threshold that is lowered by certain triggers in your life can be in some people increased by simply avoiding those triggers, without the need for medication. Do you know of any other potential triggers, such as changes in diet, alcohol or drug consumption (including prescribed stuff), lifestyle changes, or other health problems, that were affecting you around the time you experienced the seizure, or are still affecting you now? Also, do you have any longstanding health issues that you know about?
Your experience actually reminds me rather a lot of something that happened on my own 25th birthday, when from out of the blue I began to experience first the aura, then the symptoms of a very severe migraine attack. It came on early in the morning while I was in a college class, and completely incapacitated me for about 24 hours. Luckily I realised what it was and managed to get back home while I could still see, and stand up, and wasn't throwing up constantly - my family are very prone to migraines so I was quite familiar with the symptoms even though I hadn't had anything of the kind myself before. Now, my seizure symptoms have been around a long time but are quite distinctly different from the classic migraine symptoms I was experiencing, so I knew there was something different going on. I went to the doctor as soon as I was able, and described my symptoms. Because they were so typical, it had been quite a bad attack, and I had a family history, he diagnosed migraine immediately and prescribed medication.
I'm pretty sure his diagnosis was actually correct - ie that I experienced a migraine as opposed to anything else. However, I didn't have a migraine before that day, and I've never had one since or needed that medication, a few years on now; the most I've had is a few migraine aura-like twinges, which may in fact have been seizure related. I put this down to one simple fact: the day before the migraine attack I'd had some processed food with a lot of chemicals in (stuff I would usually go to great lengths to avoid) which had left me feeling a bit strange since shortly after eating, and was still reminding me of its presence the next day. I'm pretty sure that the cause lay in the fact that the food contained several chemical additives I would normally have not eaten which acted as a potent migraine trigger. I'm pretty careful about diet generally, partly in the hope of reducing seizure symptoms. Since that unpleasant experience, I've if anything been even more careful about avoiding certain kinds of processed foods and checking labels than I was before (this one occasion was a lapse).
I therefore don't feel it would be accurate to describe myself as a migraine sufferer; more as someone who is capable of experiencing a migraine in the right circumstances. As I'm pretty sure of what the trigger is and how to avoid it (and it's relatively easily avoided if I just pay attention to what I'm eating) it's possible I won't ever have another one, unless I either get careless or develop new triggers. (I wish seizure experiences were so easily avoided!) It's possible that something similar may apply to your own seizure: as I've said, I'm not an expert, but I definitely think it would be helpful to you to look into potential triggers and see if something out of the ordinary may have provoked it.
