Posted by avid abulia on June 11, 2003, at 18:24:01
hi babblers...
i have a name. we`ll leave it at that for now.
my life has been one of those things you don`t see or live, you hear about it in the paper... as in ~so and so had such and such happen, and you can send condolences to his survivors here...~
to start, i was born with tourette`s syndrome. like most touretters i have the accompanying OCD and ADhD (excuse me, my computer is dysfucktional and i can`t do uppercase g or h, or quotes or apostrophes. bear with me on that one). i was never diagnosed or treated despite a few years of coprolalia until i was 16. prior to diagnosis, i was struck by lightning once and knocked unconscious for two hours once. subsequent to the head trauma, i developed complex partial seizures of the occipital lobes and basilar migraines. these were not diagnosed until recently, after my fourth severe blunt trauma and prolonged unconsciousness left me with such severe migraines they required demerol and that made me have a generalized tonic-clonic seizure. but that is skipping ahead. i was finally diagnosed with a mental illness after i took sudafed for a cold and (i really had very little OTC or other drug use at that time) and went into status complex partial (repeated seizures again and again with no break) and was detained by the police for walking into a grocery store, screaming and barking and attempting to stick my hand in a deli-meat slicer and trying to beat my way through a crowd of people who would not let me do it. the ER doc saw the cuts all over my arm (i also was severely abused at a young age and perhaps for that reason or perhaps some other have anorexia and am now barely recovered from i bad self-mutilation habit) and sent me to a psych unit. the psychiatrist diagnosed me as schizophrenic because he asked why i ticced and i told him i couldn`t help it, i just got a weird feeling in a muscle or a group of muscles and they do their thing. why that made me a schizophrenic, i don`t know, but it has been my experience that a lot of hospital doctors are idiots. he prescribed risperdal, and it was useless, and i spent the next several years taking useless psych meds for everything from schizophrenia to borna-virus disease, not to mention dropping enough acid to be legally insane 140 times over before finding out i had a seizure disorder and couldn`t do that.
i cannot take SSRIs, tricyclics, or atypical antipsychotics because they not only don`t work they make me nuts because of the seizure issue (which my two neurologists and psychiatrist believe to be a large part of my bipolar-like mood issue, as i have hypothalamic lesions from being in cardiac arrest for who knows what reason for *five hours* before being found that display some odd EEg activity). of course, medical issues aside, i have some problems stemming from sixteen years of undiagnosed tourette`s and OCD that are probably contributing significantly to my depressions.
so, all in all, i have 4 blunt trauma lesions, two microvascular ischemia lesions, and two lesions from being hit by lightning... plus i have a family history of eating disorders, alcoholism, and suicide... and i am the first oddball of the family to display tourettic symptoms.
the only two medications i have thus far had any success at all with and no seizure exacerbation (if you don`t count self-medication with marijuana) are lamictal and inversine; effexor and wellbutrin both helped my mood, but i cannot take them after getting more head injuries (i really oughtta never leave the house without a helmet... ). for an acute migraine, i generally dissolve 10mg of valium under my tongue, and usually that puts me to sleep and i wake up okay again... but sometimes it is bad enough that it doesn`t work, and i have to go to cajole someone to drive me to the ER despite the fact i am retching bile onto their shoes, then i must convince the doc through my haziness and dysphasia that the only drug regimen that is effective and safe for me to use for severe migraine is visteril/morphine/toradol because my primary care doctor won`t prescribe these for home use despite letters from my neurologists and pressure from ER docs, because he says it is not as effective to use a phenergan suppository, toradol pre-made injection, and oral morphine after the phenergan kicks in.
i have just started keppra for seizure and migraine prophylaxis, and it has had a little bit of an effect but so far but i am still on a low dose and not titrated up to a full one yet. i have also heard it is just starting to be used for mood disorders as well, and was wondering if anyone out there had any experience with it (and if anyone has suggestions for how to better deal with migraines when triptans and inapsine cannot be used, i`d like to hear that as well).
poster:avid abulia
thread:233265
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20030609/msgs/233265.html