Bask in the Blessing
About a month ago, I decreased my epilepsy medication 50 milligrams a day without telling my neurologist or my husband. In June, it will be two years since I have had a seizure, so I thought that it would be O.K. for me to take my treatment program into my own hands. The medicine makes me tired and causes me to lose focus easily. Decreasing helped me to wake up in the mornings, and I felt like I was more productive.
Everything was great. I just felt a tad bit guilty. You know, about the lying thing. But, I rationalized to myself, I wasn't really lying. I was just not telling the people who would object to it that I had decreased my meds.
I always start to feel strange when it is a certain time of the month. I do not have a cycle anymore, but I think that it is still hormonal. I take progesterone and estrogen to balance out the hormones, but if there is a surge or a drop, then I feel it. This month, the strange feeling happened, and the next day I got a migraine. I still get migraines every month. But in the past my migraines used to warn me that I was having a seizure. It did worry me that because I had decreased my medication and that I could have a seizure.
I had read about the seizure alert apps that you can download onto your Apple Watches. I was at home all day with a migraine, and I thought it would be a good time to try out the app. I downloaded the EpiWatch app first, and found that I did not qualify for it. It is free, but you have to have had a seizure with in the past year. So I researched some other apps on this website: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319430.php . I chose SeizAlarm. It alerts you and sends a message to a contact if it detects seizure activity based on motion and heart rate.
What did I find? I was supposedly having seizure activity. Was it accurate, or were they false alarms? I had a migraine. And maybe the medication was holding some seizures at bay. The app picked up on heart-rate abnormalities, but I did not feel like I had a seizure. I just felt like I had a migraine. If I had not been on my medication, I maybe I would have.
Now the question remains, is the amount of medication I am on enough? I am not sure, but I increased it back to the regular amount to be safe. I think that I will continue to use SeizAlarm for a month or two to give my neurologist more data at my next appointment. I removed the motion detection option from my phone, and I increased my periictal threshold to 130. If the alarm goes off, and I think that it is false, I hit false alarm. If it goes off, and I feel like it may have been an aura associated with a migraine, I log the information into the app for my neurologist.
Sometimes I spend too much time focusing on how much I hate being on the medication instead of recognizing that it has given me my independence back. I am one of those people who will Web MD a drug and when I am taking it, and blame my sprained ankle on the "unsteady gait" side effect of my medication. When I spend all day on a Saturday obsessing over my lesson plans, it is not my fault! It must be the medication I am on. I can't remember being this spaced out as a child . . . although my fifth grade math teacher did used to say that "I was in the black hole" when I was day dreaming. So maybe I have always had trouble focusing, and I just like to blame it on the meds.
However, I am in a much better place than I was two years ago. I am not sure when I will get off of my medication, but maybe I should shift my focus. I used to pray for healing for an end to the seizures. And I have that now. I have arrived. So what I have learned this week is that I need to stop obsessing on the side effects and begin to bask in the blessing.