Even with all the medical advances, relatively speaking, neurology is still in the dark ages compared to cardiology, cancer research, pulmonology, etc. My wife has epilepsy, she has on very few occasions had minor episodes, generally staring in space, but is now on Keppra which seems to be working very well. My lovely daughter when she was 8 had one petite mal seizure. Technically she’s still considered epilectic, any freshman med student who reads her EEG could see the abnormal activity, but she hasn’t had another seizure since then and does not need any meds. Go figure.
“The psychiatrist who diagnosed me said I was the clearest example of TLE he had ever seen,”
Nothing for nothing but that might be part of the problem........she should have seen a neurologist not a shrink, imho.
Even then, some of them are clueless too. I ended up firing my son’s first neuro, found a great team at Boston Children’s Hospital where they mapped out his brain and he ended up having part of his left temporal lobe removed (then some more on a 2nd procedure - they cut conservatively). He lost a little strength in his arm and walks like a drunken sailor if he walks more than a thousand feet or so, otherwise he is fine. In his case the docs were surprised how well he did - they thought he would be blind in one eye and lose some other functions but because the cause of his epilepsy was dysplasia, a malformed lobe @ birth, the surrounding tissues assumed those functions.