{"id":3660,"date":"2017-12-20T18:17:35","date_gmt":"2017-12-21T00:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/?p=3660"},"modified":"2017-12-20T18:17:35","modified_gmt":"2017-12-21T00:17:35","slug":"seizures-and-bonus-features","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/?p=3660","title":{"rendered":"Seizures and bonus features"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was seizure-free for about 15 years. Now I&#8217;m definitely not anymore.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s strange is that even though I&#8217;m having them more frequently than in the past, they&#8217;ve been small ones. Simple partial seizures. I&#8217;ll see some random image in my head or be unable to put words together in a sentence because they get all scrambled up in my brain. Sometimes I just feel a surge that&#8217;s kinda like blood rushing into your ears. All very hard to explain, but all very minor compared to blackouts or full-blown grand mal seizures. In that sense, I&#8217;m extremely lucky.<\/p>\n<p>After so many years, I finally needed to change my medication back in October, so the doctor and I decided to increase the dosage of one and leave the other. That hasn&#8217;t solved the problem: I had two more seizures over the weekend. Only the second one was noticeable because I was having a conversation and then all of the words kinda swirled away. Well, not <i>all<\/i> of the words&#8212;I was still able to sit there swearing under my breath.<\/p>\n<p>So now it&#8217;s time for another change, but instead of only adjusting what I&#8217;m already taking, the doctor is prescribing Vimpat. I&#8217;d never heard of it before my last appointment, but&#8230; well, if the doc thinks it&#8217;ll work, I&#8217;m hoping he&#8217;s right. The part that&#8217;s a little bit concerning is that before starting this medication, I needed to get an EKG. (Regardless of what you may have heard from women in any of my prior relationships, I do in fact have a heart.)<\/p>\n<p>I had the EKG done this morning and the doctor signed off on it, but the results showed an abnormality. No one elaborated, just said that I needed to make an appointment to come in later this week. Which thankfully means I&#8217;m probably not gonna drop dead from heart failure in the next few days.<\/p>\n<p>More seizures and now possibly heart problems. But instead of panicking (which seems like a reasonable option at this point), I still feel very lucky. Things could be much worse. For one thing, I could drop dead from heart failure <b>NOW!<\/b> &#8230; Or maybe <b>NOW!<\/b> &#8230; How about <b>NOW!<\/b> Nope, still alive and still feeling very lucky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was seizure-free for about 15 years. Now I&#8217;m definitely not anymore. What&#8217;s strange is that even though I&#8217;m having them more frequently than in the past, they&#8217;ve been small ones. Simple partial seizures. I&#8217;ll see some random image in my head or be unable to put words together in a sentence because they get &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/?p=3660\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Seizures and bonus features&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[404,822,735],"class_list":["post-3660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epilepsy","tag-epilepsy-2","tag-heart","tag-seizures"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1muBs-X2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3660"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3665,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3660\/revisions\/3665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}