Living With Epilepsy

It is often difficult for the residents we look after to be able to describe their seizures, these descriptions give a small insight into what they feel when experiencing certain seizure types.


These accounts come from people whose epilepsy affects a part of their brain either before or during a seizure when they haven't lost consciousness entirely, but enough for it to be disturbed in various ways.
Annie Parker.

• The seizures start with a feeling of time slowing down immensely while everything is happening in slow motion as it has done many times before. I then get a feeling of warmth and tightness in the pit of my stomach and then a sudden feeling of terror and I know it's going to happen again and I start to panic and feel I can't breathe.

• I have a short warning. Everything is amplified tremendously and then the visions start, it starts with a view of a city in ruins. I can never remember afterwards exactly what I see after that. When I come round I'm often extremely disorientated, forget my name and suffer extreme emotional confusion and usually tears.

• It's like people whispering, that's the nearest I can get to it. There's a kind of 'fwish, fwish,fwish in my ears for about 30 seconds before I black out. After a seizure I feel disorientated, sounds are muffled and I have a headache. I have little memory of the seizure but as I am semi - conscious when I recover I can realise something is wrong and ask others to verify it.

• My chest and stomach start tightening. I feel a kind of exultation and an intense feeling of love and radiance.

• People sound as if they are talking through water or through some other medium - I know people are speaking to me but the words are distorted. Then I start to feel dizzy and sick and feel like I'm losing it. 

• I get a foul smell, like rotting eggs followed by a rising or surging sensation in my stomach, a bit like being on a roller coaster. Then I feel as if I'm being sucked into a narrowing tunnel.