Sunday, June 9, 2013

Epilepsy Education

I know very little about epilepsy and seizures. Growing up the little I knew came from the media like the rest of the world I suppose. I thought seizures were things people got and they shook and vomited and you had to keep them from swallowing their tongue or some weird shit like that.

I never knew anyone with epilepsy growing up (that I knew of at least). The first time anyone I knew had a seizure was when my aunt had one. She had more than one and I didn't understand it and I forget how my parents tried to explain it, obviously not the memorable part (she wound up having brain cancer and died and I'm not going to get into that).

I learned that certain things could trigger seizures from their warning labels: video/computer games, strobe lights, etc. That was all I knew. I figured it must really suck being triggered to have seizures by all that stuff. I don't remember if I understood what epilepsy was even or just thought people magically got seizures from video games.

Anyway. I have since encountered the wonderful Neurodivergent K. Their frustration with the inaccessibility of the world has made me more aware of epilepsy and more knowledgeable about it. I still know very little. I still don't really understand it. I will presumably learn a lot more in nursing school, but still not enough. So, Neurodivergent K has offered to help me out and fill in the blanks of my epilepsy knowledge and to help me review some of the information I'm receiving throughout my education from the perspective of somebody who actually gets what epilepsy is like.

I hope to have many more posts on epilepsy education but for now I have a handful of links to their blog posts to share and then the first textbook critique of the semester.

Partial WHAT?
What epilepsy is
Anticonvulsants & me
First Responders & Me
My seizure first aid



Textbook Game!
So, the image below was taken from Taylor's Clinical Nursing Skills: A Nursing Process Approach (3rd edition) by Pamela Lynn. It says that this is for a patient known to have seizures and how to protect them. 

Neurodivergent K's response: That's standard for people with tonic clonic seizures. For people with partial complex, it could be anything from "eh whatever" to "they trip on the guard rail because they go for a walk", which is all kinds of exciting. The persistant ignoring of partial seizures baffles me, since they're by far the most common.

So, I was curious why this seemed to be only directed at tonic clonic seizures. I thought maybe it had previously specified that the "seizures" they refer to here are tonic clonic and that those were the dangerous ones to be addressed blah blah. So, since I have ebooks I did searches within them.

Total instances in the textbook of the following phrases:
partial complex seizure: 0
partial seizure: 0
tonic clonic: 0
seizure: 63
epilepsy: 6

Hmmm. I hope I will be learning something about epilepsy in nursing school...otherwise, Neurodivergent K supplementary education!!

Might update this post later or post more fun epilepsy related things. 

No comments:

Post a Comment