Please give me your experiences of your memory troubles? I would appreciate it if you would tell me if friends, family, and society in general understands? I mean, truly understands. Please be brutally honest, no one but us guys is going to read this, and for all of us that have short term memory troubles, hopefully we can help and reassure each other? Hope so!
My sister had lots of experience with this, especially towards the end. She would often forget having seen movies, or meeting a particular person. She would try and guess sometimes I think.
She also had problems remembering how to do stuff at work after moderate seizures. That is in part why she wrote down complete lists of how to do particular tasks. In the end, she became more efficient than the average worker by doing so.
I note that during her last year, I gave her a couple of books to read to get good at a particular thing, and she got frustrated as she had forgotten them completely when I asked her about it again.
There was one time when she had an exceptionally bad seizure and forgot a whole semester worth of courses, which she had to relearn over summer (I assume). I don't know how she did it, but I take my hat off to her. She was an amazing person.
I think in a lot of ways the E-related memory loss must be similar to dementia, but with the ability to form new memories and hence, analyze new situations effectively - so it is less disabling but still must be extremely difficult to cope with.
My suspicion is that each seizure as a brain damage event, and over time there is cumulative damage in the same way that boxing will bring on cumulative brain damage, which shows up (years later especially) as dementia pugilista. Another way it reminds me of boxing - early in a fighter's career, they may be known for having a strong chin. They can take a lot of blows without being knocked out. However, the more blows they take the easier they get knocked out in future. I saw this with my sister - she did not appear to have nearly as much trouble when she was younger, in fact she would regularly go out drinking every weekend. I'm not sure whether this would bring on a seizure back then, but she certainly could not do this later in life, her seizure threshold was much lower. There was also the fact that she was in a stressful job that caused a lot of seizures. For her health, she should have seen the situation for what it was earlier and quit - though she was not the quitting type.
So seizure minimization is not just a good idea in terms of day to day life, it may mean the difference between long term quality of life (memory, reduced seizure threshold) and longevity. I guess if any parents are reading this, it's worth drilling into your kids that just because they can recover from a seizure now and seem to be ok, there will probably be long-term consequences to taking that sort of risk, and they won't be good.