Fyodor Dostoevsky kept a record of his seizures in a notebook. There were 102. Today some people with epilepsy do the same on Pinboards. Those less candid among the epileptic Pinterest community post empowering quotes: “Don’t flatter yourself. I wasn’t staring at you. I have petite mal seizures.”
The petite mal is a seizure not often diagnosed until it has been happening for quite a while. It involves no convulsions, only a person staring off, as if lost in thought. The spells often last just a few seconds. A child who has petite mal seizures might be dismissed as inattentive. Under that mistaken presumption, he might be given Adderall, when the real problem is a seizure disorder.
Sometimes Dostoevsky did convulse in a more Hollywood seizure fashion, even foaming at the mouth. He also slipped into outwardly subtler “ecstatic” seizures, which rendered him blissful. Actually, that’s extreme understatement. “I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world,” he once said of the episodes, “and this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss I would give 10 or more years of my life, even my whole life perhaps.”
Those auras most likely originated in the temporal lobe of his brain, where biochemical lapses can cause bursts of terror or euphoria that run the gamut from fleeting to life-altering. Oliver Sacks told in this magazine the story of a bus driver who, in the midst of a temporal-lobe seizure, collected fares while telling passengers how pleased he was to be in heaven.
Continue –> Do I Have Exploding Head Syndrome? — The Atlantic.
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