Battling Epilepsy: An Account and Explanation of a Patient’s Experience
By: Zara Pehlivani
Tags: Epilepsy, Neuroscience, Brain, Neurology, Neurons

“I’ve had epilepsy since I was four, so for about eight years now.”

I spoke with a student with epilepsy about their experience and the effect that epilepsy has had on their life.

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder. It affects the neurons in one’s brain, and can be initially caused by many different factors, including injury, infection, brain bleeding, mutations, or genetic predisposition. Epilepsy is defined as a condition where a person experiences seizures on a frequent basis.

What exactly is a seizure?

A seizure is not necessarily characterized by full-body muscle convulsions. While this is how seizures are typically portrayed in pop culture, epileptic symptoms are often much more subtle.

A seizure is simply an electrical disturbance in the brain. Our neurons communicate through electrical and chemical signals, but a malfunction in electrical signaling among a group of connected neurons can cause a seizure. Because the series of signals delivered by neurons cause different thought processes, movements, and emotions, seizures can cause unprecedented and unintentional muscle contractions, speech impairment, and memory loss.

“I have petit mal seizures, which is, literally, French for ‘small illness.’ It’s basically a type of epilepsy where … I go into these ‘staring spells.’ It’s a little like … blacking out for a hot minute, and you just kind of forget what you were talking about, what happened during that time. Afterwards it’s like a hole in your memory.”

Petit mal, or “absence,” seizures are generalized seizures. This means that electrical abnormalities begin in one area of the brain but quickly spread to the rest of it. Generalized seizures usually result in a temporary loss of consciousness. Absence seizures are often unprecedented and result in an attention lapse, characterized by staring or repeated facial movements.

“The other half is grand mal seizures, which is like the opposite — so it’s not small illness, it’s big illness. And it’s basically where I can fall, which is — it’s linked to my iron deficiency — I can literally just randomly fall. This makes me sensitive to things like strobe lights.”

Grand mal seizures are also generalized, but can have much more drastic effects and increase the likelihood of injury. Grand mal seizures are the kinds you see in movies and shows — large and convulsive, and often longer-lasting.

Effects on a patient’s life

“At first, like, when I was little, it didn’t really have that much of an effect, just because I wasn’t doing much, you know, just going to school and it wasn’t that big of a deal. I’d just take my medication and be done with it. But then when you get older, you obviously have more responsibility towards yourself, so I had to become more cautious.”

There are certain things that they can’t do, like over-exertion or watching certain movies.

“If I’m watching a movie, I’d have to be wary … if it says ‘triggering to epileptic viewers; don’t watch this.’ So that’s a little annoying — I can’t watch certain movies because they can have a lot of flashing stimuli. I also can’t do other things, like, I can’t over-exert myself, which is why I had to stop swimming.”

They could also have a seizure at any time, anywhere. They noted that most of their seizures happen at night and rarely at school. While some environments are more triggering than others, a consciousness lapse due to hyperactivity can occur unprecedentedly at any moment. However, there is an extremely useful tool that can help epilepsy patients predict the onset of seizures and identify particularly triggering stimuli.

Monitoring epilepsy with electroencephalography

An epilepsy patient goes to regular electroencephalography appointments, where a specialist can monitor their brainwave activity. Neural oscillations (or brainwaves) result from neural activity in the brain. The generalized brainwave activity of a non-epileptic person on a normal day with casual activity is low-frequency. On the other hand, the brainwaves of a patient with epilepsy are much more aggressive and hectic, with spurts of closely-packed, high-frequency oscillations.

EEGs, or electroencephalograms, record and graph neural activity via electrode input.

“They stick these little electrodes like on your scalp with some glue to monitor your brain activity. They make you do a bunch of things to try to trigger a seizure so they can monitor it.”

“In the first round, they have strobe lights, so basically you have your eyes closed, and they shine the strobe light in your face … every round it clicks faster and faster, because it’s supposed to be more triggering.”

Sensitivity to flashing lights is what prevents them from watching certain movies or shows.

EEG technologies are becoming increasingly useful tools for monitoring epilepsy. They allow patients and specialists to determine specific triggers for seizures, which can help a patient prevent them.

“I think it’s really cool that we’re pairing technology with healthcare like this We can do more and prevent more with it, and it’s clearly helping. Right now, there are signs that I’m getting better.”