Son just had 2nd seizure -- ASD, ADD, now seizure disorder

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schleppenheimer
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11 Nov 2013, 8:10 am

Last week my son had his 2nd grand mal seizure at school. Really banged his head (on the desk), confused and disoriented, and we took him to the hospital. They did an MRI (found nothing) and an EEG (positive for abnormal electrical spikes). He slept for about 24 hours off and on, but bounced back quickly. The first time he had a seizure was six months ago, but he was on Wellbutrin, and we blamed that because it lowers the seizure threshold. Now, we attribute the seizures to ASD.

Up to this point, things were already bad for my son. We see a specialist for ADD, because he has inattentive ADD. 9th grade was spent figuring out appropriate meds, and 10th grade was WONDERFUL. Concerta, Cymbalta and clonodine all helped to allow him to concentrate and still be his regular cheerful self. Then, in 11th grade, with the SAME MEDS, things fell apart, again. No ability to concentrate, took forever to do homework, and needed lots of hovering by his parents. The meds just didn't seem to work anymore.

NOW, we are going from bad to worse with the added problems that seizures bring. I keep reading about anti-convulsants making people sleepy and inattentive. Yeah, we sure needed MORE OF THAT. I also read that for some people, anti-convulsants can possibly improve their inattentive situation (hoping that's the case for DS).

I'm really very depressed and negative right now. We just put in DS's application for college, a nice small LAC that would have been a great place for him to feel accepted and to slowly achieve some social and educational goals. Now, I'm feeling that possibility slipping away from him. It's bad enough that he has to stop driving (I know that he can get his license back if he's seizure-free for six months), but it just seems like everything is SO HARD for him, no matter how much he works and tries to do better.

So, for those of you out there who have seizures/epilepsy AND ADD, how do you combine meds and have a a successful outcome? How does the anti-convulsant medication NOT offset the stimulant effect of ADD meds?



ASDMommyASDKid
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11 Nov 2013, 11:34 pm

I do not have any experience on this, but I wanted to post to say I am sorry that your son is having these problems. I am guessing you already have investigated how long Wellbutrin might stay in someone's system after it is discontinued and you have studied the other meds he is on, and that is all I could come up with.

I am sure someone will post who had direct experiences, but I wanted to express that I empathize.



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12 Nov 2013, 12:35 am

Sympathy from me too, because that STINKS.

I don't know if it might have anything to do with your situation, but I had a problem with losing consciousness when I was about his age (late teens early twenties).

As it turns out, it was hypoglycemia and exhaustion. Not that I was clinically afflicted with hypoglycemia-- just that I would get wrapped up in what I was doing, or not be comfortable asking for food if I wasn't in my own home, and forget to eat. I'd had the experience of wanting to stick food in my mouth, but until I was about 17 had never been allowed to go long enough between meals to actually find out what "hunger pangs" felt like...

...so I had to learn that stomach cramps and mild nausea meant "You need to eat, stupid" and not "Your nerves are getting cranked up again."

I completely lost consciousness, and fell on the floor having seizure-like convulsions, five or six times before I finally made the connection (meanwhile my dad was spazzing out about brain cancer, and the rest of my relatives just figured I was on lots of drugs like the rest of the kids in the family at that age). I might never have put the pieces together if there hadn't been a lecture in my Human Nutrition class about what happens when the brain runs short of glucose.

Probably my experience is totally different...

...but it might be worth looking into whether he's taking the time, trouble, and general hassle to eat before assuming it has to be a seizure disorder.


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BuyerBeware
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12 Nov 2013, 12:35 am

Sympathy from me too, because that STINKS.

I don't know if it might have anything to do with your situation, but I had a problem with losing consciousness when I was about his age (late teens early twenties).

As it turns out, it was hypoglycemia and exhaustion. Not that I was clinically afflicted with hypoglycemia-- just that I would get wrapped up in what I was doing, or not be comfortable asking for food if I wasn't in my own home, and forget to eat. I'd had the experience of wanting to stick food in my mouth, but until I was about 17 had never been allowed to go long enough between meals to actually find out what "hunger pangs" felt like...

...so I had to learn that stomach cramps and mild nausea meant "You need to eat, stupid" and not "Your nerves are getting cranked up again."

I completely lost consciousness, and fell on the floor having seizure-like convulsions, five or six times before I finally made the connection (meanwhile my dad was spazzing out about brain cancer, and the rest of my relatives just figured I was on lots of drugs like the rest of the kids in the family at that age). I might never have put the pieces together if there hadn't been a lecture in my Human Nutrition class about what happens when the brain runs short of glucose.

Probably my experience is totally different...

...but it might be worth looking into whether he's taking the time, trouble, and general hassle to eat before assuming it has to be a seizure disorder.


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"Alas, our dried voices when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless, as wind in dry grass, or rats' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar." --TS Eliot, "The Hollow Men"


schleppenheimer
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16 Nov 2013, 8:19 pm

Thanks for responding, ASDmommyASDkid and BuyerBeware. You definitely made me feel a little better.

The Wellbutrin was discontinued over six months ago, so I'm guessing (?) that it's well out of his system by now. But who knows? I'm definitely not an expert in these kinds of things…

BuyerBeware, your experience really does make me wonder. I'm pretty sure that my son had an honest-to-gosh seizure, because the way witnesses described it, he had the familiar jerking of limbs, the sudden drop of his head onto the desk, and fell over and was seizing for a minute. But you do hope that it's more something like hypoglycemia, as you experienced. Oh, that it was something as simple as that … it would be WONDERFUL.

I've had a few more days to adapt, but I just wish that all of this bad stuff would quit happening to my son. He is perennially cheerful and happy, usually looking on the bright side -- but any 17 year old would be sad at the prospect of not being able to drive, or being EVEN MORE cognitively cloudy than usual. He's a sharp kid -- has been taking Honors Calculus, Physics, Honors Environmental Science … and then this happens…

I'm going to look into any possible things we can do to change his diet -- kind of leaning towards a Modified Atkins Diet (helpful for seizures, apparently) and the Gluten Free diet (tried that when he was little, but didn't stick with it long enough to see if it really helped). Checking into a diet just gives me something positive to do when I feel so out of control and can't help him in any other way.