Archive of ‘personal’ category

21
Feb
2021

Since I promised that post, here goes nothing.

categories: personal; word count: 330 words

I had my first seizure in April of 2019 when my mother was still alive.

It woke me up from deep sleep, and I went through the whole aura, seizure, and postdrome.

Since this was my first seizure, I didn’t know what was going on and felt like I was dying. It lasted a few minutes, but my sense of time was heavily distorted — to me, it felt like absolutely forever. And symptoms of it left as quickly as it came on, although I felt exhausted at the end of it. For me, the aura often involves experiencing an intense feeling that does not quite match the situation, and the seizure itself feels like my brain is being shocked or an egg that is thrown against hot concrete to cook. I can vocalize during these, although the people that I have vocalized to have told me that I seem “off” having these conversations. I don’t want to vocalize while I’m having them though, not unless I have to, because it feels like I’m taxing the small part of my brain that is completely aware of what is going on. I can also do very basic things during some of my seizures, which perplexes me. Others, I have to wait until it passes. There is no rhyme or reason.

Sometimes I can go months without a seizure. Other times, I have multiple seizures in a month.

I also do not have any involuntary motor movement. However, I am known to hold my head with my hands and rest my elbows on my lap, and the quieter my surroundings are when they can help it, the better. Almost all of the time I still feel the peculiar emotion that was present during my aura, although by the end of the seizure my feelings have returned to normal. Being on Gabapentin for migraines has really helped me out.

Another feature of my seizures are racing thoughts, which also completely stop when the seizures stop.

20
Feb
2021

This is why I am not playing Cyberpunk 2077.

categories: personal, RPGs, survival horror; word count: 188 words

When Cyberpunk 2077 came out, I was initially excited to play the game.

However, that was short-lived when I found out that a certain part of it caused people to have seizures.

I am epileptic myself, although I retain awareness and consciousness during all of my seizures, and I have no involuntary motor movement. Even though I do not appear to be photosensitive, it wasn’t — and isn’t — a risk that I was (am) willing to take, especially if I had a seizure that… laid me out, so to speak. Even though that was almost immediately patched and friends of mine have told me that that section of the game is a lot “tamer”, I still haven’t played our copy of Cyberpunk 2077. I’m waiting for a lot more information to come out about it, especially that part of the game. My seizures feel like something is shocking my brain, like my brain is an egg thrown onto hot concrete, immediately cooking. If I can avoid them, that would just be awesome.

That also reminds me that I would like to write a post all about my epilepsy since why not?

16
Feb
2021

I actually have a restraining order against someone.

categories: personal; word count: 438 words

Surprisingly, it is bundled into my oldest son’s custody order.

The behavior that my oldest son’s father exhibited was actually bad enough to deny him access to our son — it was domestic violence — pending the completion of a court-ordered class that, to this day, he has not even tried to enroll in. When he was on probation for assaulting me, he made it a habit to go to one of the branches of the library here and send me harassing and threatening messages over MySpace. He did this every single day that the library was open until they were called and informed what he was doing, at which point the messages stopped. Approximately ninety days into his probation, he decided to stop showing up to visits with his probation officer and moved to a new residence that he did not inform his probation officer about. He was given sixty days to resume showing up for scheduled visits with his probation officer, which he did not do, and then his probation was revoked. Since he was on what was called deferred adjudication, or deferred sentencing, this meant that his guilty plea — held back until that point, because the state would have dropped the assault charge that he had pending upon successful completion of probation — was entered, and he was convicted of the original offense. The criminal justice unit here was actually surprised that he did not successfully complete probation given the circumstances. Personally, I was not surprised.

When he was originally being put on probation, I put in an application for a restraining order against him. It was denied, and the rationale for this denial was that it would be addressed in the rules of his probation and he would be prohibited from contacting me for any reason. Obviously this did not occur because of the messages that he sent me over MySpace at the library, and my custody lawyer put in an application for a restraining order herself including this as evidence. A restraining order without end date was approved by the judge that presided over our son’s custody hearing, although it would have allowed him to communicate with me about our son if he had ever regained access — the communications had to be non-harassing and non-threatening, though, and if they were harassing or threatening he could get into legal trouble due to them. For reasons that I will get into in another post, he is not going to be able to regain access to our child.

This is one of the reasons that I don’t use our real names here on this blog, though… especially the kids’.

11
Feb
2021

So apparently I have a new diagnosis now, fun.

categories: personal; word count: 184 words

In addition to having chronic, intractable migraines, I have occipital neuralgia now.

This was, as the kids like to say, “sussed out” by the location in which my migraines almost always start. Apparently it’s not a common diagnosis or even a common thing, although I am not surprised to have been diagnosed with… wait for it, something that isn’t common. This would explain why triptans do not really work on me, or they only work a little bit. The pain from occipital neuralgia can not be ameliorated by triptans because that pain is not actually migraine pain, even though I have both diagnoses at present. However, it can be lessened with targeted Botox shots as well as steroid shots along the location in which the nerve travels. I am open to both of these things if they can in any way meaningfully help. My pain management clinic is actually trying to get Botox injections approved for me, so I will see how that goes. It has taken awhile, but apparently these things predictably do. I will just bide my time here and wait, heh.

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