I remember being rather irked at the neurologist when he was trying to get me to take the Keppra. I can understand his apprehension; he's probably had to call the DMV on a few of his patients and doesn't care to do it. But it was like:

"We'll start you on Keppra."

"But I haven't had a full-on spell in years."

"You'll start with a low dose, and--"

"Doctor, I haven't -- "

"-- move up from there. There's also Lamictal, but that interferes with fertility -- "

"-- had a spell in -- "

"-- so we'll start off with the Keppra."

"-- years."

"What?"

"*sigh*"

He also told me nothing at all about signs to watch for that the stuff wasn't working well for me, until I asked him, "If this stuff makes my head go pear-shaped, what warning signs will I want to watch for?" That earned me a blank look.

And after hearing about the problems that people had had with settling on medications that work for them, I determined that I wasn't going to take a single one unless I had a damned good reason to do so, and given that it's been years since I've had a spell (and decades since what I've come to realize were complex partials), I'm not taking a thing. I'm not the denial type, so if it becomes evident that I need them, I'll take them. But until then?

Nope. Not unless it's needed.

Currently, the thing I'm the most interested in is actually Geschwind's Syndrome because I've been a very intense, hypergraphic person with unusual (and unusually distributed) skills for my entire life, and this is the first time I've ever seen myself described properly in a book of any kind. I'm 42 and I've never seen myself reflected so utterly anywhere before. It's an unusual experience to have for the first time in middle age.