Epilepsy: Experience & Diagnosis

Now on my blog I tend to be quite open about my life and what's going on so after these past few weeks I felt that I should share what's going on in my world... Also this is a place that allows me to get stuff off my chest which is a bit of a relief. 

Where do I start? Well many people are aware of this but if I don't start my story with this the rest will fail to make any sense so; back in August 2012 (GCSE results day) I had an epileptic fit, which was caused by the stresses of the day and therefore I moved on from this quite quickly. However, more recently I had been blanking out a bit when talking and having what seemed to be similar to very minor seizures. When these began happening more regularly I found myself feeling insecure about talking, which I love to do, and I felt as if my life was being ruled by this horrible feeling. 

This is when I decided to stand-up to whatever the problem was and finally booked an appointment at the doctors. 

I went along to the appointment, spoke to the doctor and because of my previous experience of a seizure she decided to refer me back to the neurologists that I saw before. So yep you guessed it, I went to that appointment and spoke to the same doctor as before who said he wanted to carry out another EEG test, something which tests your brain waves, however it had to be sleep deprived instead. For anyone that knows me, you should be aware that I love my sleep and going to bed any later than around 10pm is considered late for me (haha) but I managed to keep awake for the designated night - barring around an hour where I did fall asleep. 

The next day I was extremely tired and well, deprived of sleep and went off to the hospital for my test. This is where the twist in the plot arises but although it sounds terrible, it actually solved my health mystery. Whilst me and the lady were talking before she carried out the test, I had a seizure. Luckily my doctor witnessed this and was therefore able to diagnose me, this was difficult before because labeling somebody of my age as epileptic can affect their lives quite a lot. So now, I have been diagnosed with the condition and was put on medication the same day. It's safe to say that I'm definitely still catching up on sleep and although what happened seems quite scary to me, I'm grateful to now be on the right track at last!

I just thought that perhaps this post would be useful for anyone else going through the same or waiting to be diagnosed themselves and I may even do updates every now and again if somebody would find that interesting? :-) also, it's just nice to write everything down and get it out of my system.

Thanks for reading and trust me, confronting a problem is daunting - but worth it!