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

Hi neurotwam,

As I'm sure you know drugs can often mess a person up and cause epilepsy. What you are describing sounds like a simple partial seizure leading into a complex partial seizure. Depression is often a part of epilepsy and so is wierd visions such as seeing different colors or hearing different sounds these seizures are part of the complex partial seizures. When a person sees these colors the seizure is coming from the opptical lobe of the brain. The best thing for you to do is try taking vitamin B12 once a day 1000 mcg. cut back on the carbs and starch foods, and you should tell your neuro to do a special e.e.g. on you where they will flash different color lights one at a time to see if certain colors are triggering seizures. This is known as being photosensitive. I wish you the best of luck and May God Bless You!

Sue

Hi neurotwam,

i think that the marijauna you used must have been laced with something, possibly PCP. I had a similar experience as a teen smoking pot one night(i had smoked it before but didn't do it regularly) this night I had a really bad experience similar to yours, it had never happend before when smoking just pot so I think it was laced. that was something that people did a lot of back then. well I guess it still happens but different drugs. My daughter unfortunately went through a similar experience when smoking pot and it was laced with cocaine. It was such a horrible experience she doesn't do it anymore. she really only did pot a couple of times, but I swear, there are things that have happened to her in her life that are a mirror to mine growing up. You always hope your children don't have to experience some of the really bad things in life like molestation and rape and yet it can happen. It happend to me growing up and I never told my parents because i thought they would blame me and it happened to her and she didn't tell me for a long time because she didn't think I could handle it with all of my current health issues. Of course this makes me so very sad and I feel like I wasn't able to protect her.

i told my kids growing up how to stay safe when out with others etc. but some things can't be controlled unless you lock them up until they are thirty. sigh.

Back to your issue with the marijauna. did you or have you had any residual effects from it? i had "back flashes" after my episode with it for quite awhile and they would come on in the weirdest situations. Like being at a reunion for a Catholic camp I had been to that summer. It was so hard to keep myself under control. But now I look back and wonder if what was really happening was seizures that were just different than the ones I usually had at the time which were tonic clonic seizures. Later in life I had complex partial seizures too, they seemed to start with my first pregnancy. but at the time they said it was a migraine it wasn't until later when I saw a neurologist that he said it was a classic complex seizure which at the time i had no idea what that was. And it was a time of extreme stress. my seizures are triggers are stress and hormones. It seemed i would have them right before my period. Looking back at my life though I thik I had absence seizures most of my childhood as I wold be in class and everyone would be working on something and I would look down and not have a clue what it was having never heard it explained. I hid those as I was afraid that people would think I was somehow crazy and that they would put me away. It wasn't until i was 12 and it was a few months before my first period and I lost consciousness. this continued to happen and then they became tonic clonic seizures. It is terrifying as a child not knowing what is going on and having parents that would rather be in denial than to actually do anything about them. sigh.

I hope that you are able to figure out what exactly is going on. and then i hope that you are able to get the medical help that you may need.

Take care,
Sara