My old friend Epilepsy

Ah how I´ve missed you. Here I thought you might have gone away like you did for mi madre for almost 30 years... but no, you´re still here.Its 3am and I can not sleep. Tonight our tour group went to a look at the dances or Peru and eat Peruvian food goodbye dinner thing (we did one in Cuosco too, it was better there), and all of our seats for our group were laid out in a giant U around the stage. Good food, nice conversation about polyamory with the patent lawyer from Manhattan on my left, and then the stage shows began. Unimpressive, though I did letch on one cute stage performer with hot bands of beads across his bare chest- then the strobes began. Constant flashing lights. Gah. I started getting a headache. 3 minutes later it was turning into a seeing double migrane. I didn´t want to be a pain, so I just closed my eyes. a minute later mi padre encouraged me to go back to the hotel. By the time I was in a cab I was seeing sound and hearing colors, and having conversations outloud while drooling with myself.I have front lobal epilepsy. I was originally diagnoses with schizophrenia as a possible answer to my fuge states, seeing things that aren´t there, extreme mood shifts, and seeing sound back in early 2001, but after a few months of drugs that did nothing but make me sick and annoyed, my doc asked, hey, you were dropped on your head as a kid, were´n´t you? And your mother had epilepsy? Have you had a brain scan since you were 3? No? Let´s do that.September 11, 2001, between towers, I found out I had front lobal epilepsy and was put on Tegretol (Carbamezapine) for my issues. That day was a long one for very personal reasons, away from what was happening in the rest of the world. My secondary partner informed me he was getting married to a woman I´d met once, I helped arrange more than 150 prayer vigils around Oregon, and attended one myself... and so much more.Carbamezapine lobotomized me, deadened me, slowed me down. I went from being able to do 7 things at once to maybe being able to do 2. It is also a mood stabalizer, and it stabilized me so much that I lost half my ability to have orgasms, or hell, care about good or bad a lot of the time. After 3 years of averaging very few seisures, and also having lost health insurance, I took 3 months and tapered myself off my drugs.In the past year I´ve had some really severe mood issues (but all have started with some real emotional ce, but 4 have gone innappropiate this year in my opinion- halloween weekend in the dark, the box, and the two other head slamming incidents), and I had a full seisure fuge state back in the spring where I got lost and then bought ice cream... but this is my first once since spring, and yeah, unexpected. No fuge state this time, and I was able to explain to mi padre that I needed him to go to the pharmacy to buy me migrane meds (hooray for not needing scrips here), because at least treating symptoms helps sometimes.So I lay in bed. My body is still feeling off, but my senses other than touch are back to normal. My body feels very very heavy- so heavy that it woke me up because the pressure of my arm against my body felt like 100lbs on my torso. I don´t bite my tongue. I do twitch a little. But mostly its a sensory seisure issue. I keep telling myself that I will consider going back on drugs if I continue to have inappropriate mood reactions or more than 2 bad seisures a year, but... no insurance, dislike the drugs I was on before (even if I can acquire them without scrip in Mexico easy enough, did for almost a year), and am horrid on taking daily, let alone twice a day with food, meds.But epilepsy is odd, she´s like an old friend. When I have a real seisure and can tell so clearly it is one, and then can look at my possessions and other woo woo stuff, I know they are different and honestly feel less crazy. I am not my grandmother, who is schizophrenic. I feel connected with mi madre, who has petit and grand mal seisures once in a while (had none between the ages of 21 and 52). I know that literally my brain works differently than other people, and I find it comforting.