To: snarks_when_bored
I had brain surgery when I was 18 for epilepsy and was one of the lucky ones. If I get enough sleep, I have no seizures now. The only side effect was loss of some peripheral vision and some memory loss, but it would be most excellent if they could do something like this rather than a right temporal lobectomy as I had done. I'm glad to see one more story that shows an epileptic is not necessarily stupid. I'm also a computer programmer. Guess that means we really don't use very much of our brains. :)
4 posted on
02/25/2005 4:35:54 PM PST by
Giliad
(I've got a fevah, and the only prescription is more cowbell)
To: Giliad
Glad your seizures were stopped by the surgery. I hope you won't mind if I ask a couple of questions. After the surgery, did you notice any changes in the quality of your conscious awareness (if that makes sense)? Did the world look pretty much the same to you afterwards as before, and did you feel the same?
To: Giliad
Hi Giliard, my son had his left temporal lobe removed & then some surrounding matter around it the second time around. He scored in the 98 percentile in math nationally before the first surgery, has dipped down to around the 80 percentile but actually went up in English. He still scores higher than most of his peers after missing a year of school.
As for being stupid or not, my son had his first procedure at 15 & this last one at 17. The doctors explain that he had the problem at birth and his brain developed around the problem. The tissue they removed was already bad, the side effects are due to losing some good cells. The eye sight is due to nerves being removed or hit.
Re: Sleep. This time around they did some additional sleep studies for sleep apnea in rehab. They found he wasn't getting into a REM state until after 3 hours of sleeping instead of within minutes as normal. He's got a small breathing machine that forces regular air into his lungs at slightly higher pressure than normal. He sleeps better and has tons more energy. Do you have one? If not I HIGHLY recommend a sleep study & a machine if they find you need one.
To: Giliad
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