Just auras or anxiety too?

[Music36]

My aura is intense fear. Sometimes a fear feeling remains for hours or comes and goes for hours. The aura will be a different fear feeling that is brief and it can come and go for hours. There are times when the aura feels like it's going to go into a complex partial, but has not since surgery. Sometimes my stomach can be in knots. Sometimes there is feeling of dread. Is it just clusters of auras or anxiety, as well? I'm trying to figure out if I also have anxiety disorder or if it's just the auras or the auras causing anxiety. The anxiety got worse after surgery in 2015. It has improved, but I'm not the same as I was before surgery.

 

[Porkette]

Hi Music36,

Often I will have clusters of aura seizures in a day and sometimes it leads into a absence or complex partial seizure. I get a nervous feeling in my stomach and see colors flashing back and forth in my eyes. I may have told you this before but the moment you start to feel an aura seizure start tighten up all the muscles in your body and make your hands into tight fists and stay that way for a few seconds, if you do it quick enough it may stop the seizure. My neuro from back in the 1970's taught me this and it has worked great.
Another thing you may want to try is cold water therapy, any day you start to have seizures put a cold washcloth on your face and the back of your neck a few times that day, by doing this you are calming the neurons down in the brain. I was in a medical study and they found that each time before I had a seizure my temperature would be a little higher and by putting the cold wash cloth on my face it calmed the neurons down and stopped many seizures. Here's wishing you the best of luck and May God Bless You!

Sue

 

[Music36]

Porkette,

Thank you for responding. I know how to deal with my auras. What I want to know is whether or not I have anxiety disorder. If I remember correctly, there are days when I have the anxiety and no auras. There have been times when I'll just feel this anxiety for hours and then it disappears. It's a terrible feeling. It can come when I am nervous about something or just come for no reason. I should add that my mother and daughter both have been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. They both also have panic disorder. Neither one of them has epilepsy.

 

[Nakamova]

I don't think there's an easy way to tell the two apart, and of course it's possible to experience both, as well as to have one condition exacerbate the other.

It might help to write down the nature of the anxiety that you experience during an attack: What time(s) of day does it tend to show up? Is it general or does it land on certain topics? Does it wax and wane during the episode or maintain a steady pace? If there's a sense of dread, does that come at the beginning, or the end, or stay constant throughout? Are there any accompanying physical symptoms: Restlessness, dizziness, nervous tics, changes in blood pressure or breathing, etc. (There are "fitbit"-type devices that might help track some of these physiological symptoms.) Keeping a journal of the particulars might reveal patterns, triggers, and/or provide quantitative or qualitative clues to figuring out what's going on.

Here's an older CWE thread on the same topic that might be of interest: http://www.coping-with-epilepsy.com/forums/f23/seizure-aura-vs-anxiety-18090/

How do your mother and daughter deal with their anxiety disorder? Is it something you could try as well?