Cranial Restart

[toro]

So I just got back from a week-long in-patient EEG monitoring vacation. After stopping my medication and triggering a few seizures and scaring the living daylights out of my wife they determined left temporal lobe epilepsy. I'm off Dilantin and fully switched on to Lamictal and Keppra now.

I must say that to a certain extent ever since I got back on medicine I feel like someone hit the restart button on my brain. Things feel different than they used to. For some reason I seem to have reverted back to the person I was six or seven years ago. The same jokes and music I liked three weeks ago seem annoying to me now but the kind of activities and things I liked when I was in college excite me again.

I seem to think clearer than I did a few weeks ago, but has anyone had this happen to you? It's weird.

 

[jayde-101]

This is great news toro Im glad your feeling better how are you taking your official diagnosis ??

 

[toro]

It's good. I mean, I was told if the meds don't work we may need to think about brain surgery, which isn't terribly exciting, but the likelihood is supposed to be really small.

I'm just wondering if anyone's experienced this weird sort of 'reset' experience. I'm used to understanding that as my brain changes, so do I, it's just... a bit intense and very bon-intense. My memories haven't changed and I'm not depressed or anything, it's just that background feeling you have as you live your life seems to have reverted back to what it was before I was diagnosed (feelings I have, music I like, general opinions of things, etc.). Anyone else ever go through this? It's unnerving...

 

[Nakamova]

I've had the "reset" experience in response to seizures, and also as a response to medication. Lamictal in particular made me extra "perky" and focused when I first went on it. The downside is that it also made my sleep restless and unsatisfying (and filled with vivid nightmares.) After a few months, both side effects went away. I miss the perkiness but not the poor sleep...

 

[arnie]

I remember that after my first couple of tonic-clonic szs I felt that everything was new and fresh. Food tasted better and things seemed clearer and brighter. I was also tired an kind of confused, but I think that, in a way, the brain reset analogy seems appropriate. Those szs were about 30 years ago. In April of 2013 had a t/c which didn't seem to reset anything. It mostly scared my wife and left me with a big do-pay for an ambulance ride. Whee. (Not!) The partial seizures, which I have a few hundred of per year, don't do much except wear me out. Best to you!