Medication Chaos.

So, I started taking Clonazepam the other day. Hooray, I thought, finally I get to do something positive to help myself.

Well, so far I have had two (perhaps three, my memory is failing me worse than usual at the moment) major seizures, and am experiencing a lot of anxiety, erratic behaviour and cravings for cake, chocolate, sweets, sugar, and food in general. Now, the latter part could be to make up for the energy I am expending having my seizures, which have gone back to being quite violent and forceful, and far longer in duration than they have been.

I have also been much drowsier than usual, and apathetic about a lot of activities which usually would hold my interest. Now, I appreciate that taking a new medication for epilepsy is different to taking a paracetamol. You have to give it a few days or even weeks for it to get properly into your system and have its proper effect. They have a long-term effect, so you can't really expect results overnight. But, so far, I think its safe to say that my reaction to this particular drug has been a somewhat negative one. W agrees, and wants me to stop taking it.

Did I mention hat despite it making me drowsy, I am finding it hard to go to sleep at night? Last night I sat up jotting down ideas for a story because I couldn't switch off when I lay down to go to sleep.

I feel tense, too. Jittery and on edge, and wanting to do things right away if I have to do them at all. I want to lie down under the bedcovers and not come out, but in the same breath I could u on a pair of shoes and go for a walk and not stop and not turn around and as I type I can feel by brain working faster and faster and faster. Hence the long sentences. It is notoriously hard to convey how it feels to have a seizure if you have never experienced it four yourself, and I am finding even harder to convey the sense of duality that I have right now. I find myself being influenced by everything around me - I am very suggestible. My MP3 player is playing music of a slower tempo now, and I can feel myself slowing down slightly - I no longer want to go out and run and run. However, I am aware that if I were to listen to something with a fast tempo I would be sat here drumming my fingers or tapping my feet and gettting irritable and impatient at all the people holding me back from my true potential, which is to walk and walk and not stop going until I fall down and go to sleep, wherever I am by that point.

DOes this convey something of the chaos that mind-altering prescription drugs can have on a person, and how utterly disruptive it is for a person with epilepsy, (or depression, anxiety or any other brain-centric condition for that matter ) to change or amend their medication? Could more people read this, and understand the dread I have right now about both taking and stopping this medication, about telling my doctor who will prescribe more drugs, and about the long, long wait I will inevitably have to get any progress which helps as opposes to hinders me? Because I don't think people do understand to be honest. You say "epilepsy" and people go "Oh, that's seizures, right?" And they assume that either you have seizures a lot, which is bad, or that you "take tablets for it" and magically everything has gotten better.

It doesn't work that way. Here I am. I have epilepsy, I take tablets for it, they don't work very well, and now that they are trying new tablets, they are making me feel a whole lot worse, and a whole lot more nervous about going out of the house, and the prospect of having to carry on each day this way and somehow raise two normal children is, at this precise moment in time, terrifying me. It won't scare me later. I know that, because there is still a core part of me that, for some ridiculous reason, has this unending hope that somehow everything will turn out okay, because it always has in the past. I'm one of life's optimists, I guess. That's probably just as well, if I'm honest. It keeps me going through the bad times, and makes me, frankly, damned irritating when I'm having a good day. Still, W apparently loves me all the same, and he's been giving me lots of hugs in the wake of my seizures. I may update a little erratically for the next few days, depending upon how I feel.