Hi,
I am not diagnosed with epilepsy. As a teen, I had the following experience. I decided to try marihuana with 3 or 4 friends. A few minutes after smoking cannabis, I felt an odd pull on my stomache and a slight pain like I had torn something.
Odd, because I was at rest and not moving at all. From my midsection, a queer flushing feeling rose upwards. My heart began pounding in my chest, and I had to try to repress some anxiety. I also felt a temporary absence of feeling on my left side. Shortly afterward, my vision began to slow as if I were watching a slide show. My vision was somehow jumpy and no longer seamless in regards to motion. (hard to explain). I failed to repress the anxiety. It was now an overwhelming sensation of impending doom.
I felt a growing numbness on the left side (only) of my head. When the tingling crawled to the base of my skull at the top of my neck, something began to tense inside my head like a clock spring being wound. After 3 or 4 seconds, the spring was overwound and released in a shocking sensation.
With that sensation, my vision distorted radically as if I were suddenly looking through the wrong end of binoculars. This shocking and zooming went on at 3 or 4 second intervals for at least 10 minutes. Then it receded to a slide show. I don't believe my vision was normal for weeks afterwards.
I became very ill after this episode, and feel like I never quite recovered.
I developed clicking and popping in my ears which I believe to be palatal myoclonus. I developed an affective disorder (major depression) and suffered panic attacks for 20 years.
Since I had never smoked cannabis before, I assumed I had experienced a bad trip on a psychoactive drug. Recently, I became aware of how closely my experience matches the symptoms of focal temporal lobe seizure.
I wonder if it is possible that I had a cerebro vascular incident which caused my brain to go into hypoxia (lack of oxygen), which resulted in FTLS.
Can anyone relate their experince with FTLS?
Thank you,
neurotwam