Am I catatonic or is this just an absent seizure?

Nate

New member
I've had so far four of these unknown experiences. Unknown as in we don't know what they are. Each one of these experiences I don't seem to remember what happened. We currently believe that it is either an absent seizure or a catatonic experience.

The first experience I was sitting on the couch for 30 minutes starring of in space unresponsive to external stimuli.

The second experience I was at school and the same thing happened. This time though I had my arm raised up in the air and apparently when the teacher tried to move it she said it felt rigid and it wouldn't change locations. This apparently lasted for about 20 minutes. We then when I snapped out of it I went to the emergency at the hospital and they thought that I was having an absent seizure. So they put me on Tegretol 800mg a day.

The third experience I was in my room again unresponsive to external stimuli and apparently moving my left arm back and forth and my right arm was in the air. My mom described it as if I was playing with an imaginary violin.

The fourth experience I was apparently moving my arms back and forth up and down and my left index finger was moving up and down as well.

So today we sall a neurologist to try and figure out what the problem was. He was unsure to say whether it was an absence seizure or that I was in a Catatonic state.

I have a question though, what is the difference between an absence seizure and being catatonic?
 
Sounds like temporal lobe epilepsy. Were you confused or fuzzy after these seizures? Complex automatisms (playing air violin and the like) don't occur in absence seizures. Absence seizures are also called Petit Mal seizures, they tend to be very brief - less than 30 seconds - though they can happen many times a day.


Catatonia is a descriptive term for a state of apparent unresponsiveness seen in a ton of different disorders, including TLE. (also head injury, brain infection, medication withdrawal, stroke, mood disorders and mental illness, street drugs, high fever, hyperthyroidism - and the list goes on, there's over fifty that I could find)

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003200.htm
 
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