Neurology, Oxygen, and Me

My appointment with my neurologist yesterday was the briefest I've ever had in the nearly twenty years I've been seeing him. Part of the brevity was due to the fact that it's been nearly four years since I've had my last seizure, something I am thrilled about pretty much every day. He actually talked about taking me off medication! "The brain forgets how to have seizures after a while," was the reasoning, but since I'm the only day-caretaker of my three year-old child, experimenting with seizure medication just isn't on the menu. What an amazing thought though.

There are a few reasons why the seizures have pretty much stopped. The biggest one was that I got laid off as a software engineer. Within a month, my complex partial seizures stopped. Another one is that I found a method to make sure I take my medication daily: My wedding ring. When I take my meds in the morning, I put it on. When I take them in the evening, I take it off. It gives me (and my wife) a very quick way to determine if I've taken my medication yet. My motto has become "Trust the ring". It's worked!

Another thing I've noticed is that since I've gotten used to using CPAP, my hands don't shake as much. I'm pretty sure that this is due to the oxygen supplement that goes with it, and I have evidence to back that up. On the three-day trip up to Tahoe recently, I didn't have access to my oxygen compressor (no room in the car) and within two days, my hands started shaking again. Once I started getting O2 supplements again, they stopped.