"I wasn't expecting that!"

 Today I went for my follow-up visit with the epileptologist to see about my EEG results and check in on my meds. 

During the 24hrs of the EEG, I felt nothing. No symptoms, not even my little "twinges" that I sometimes feel. I was worried that there would be nothing on the EEG. My hope was that there would be things I didn't feel. What I didn't want was another clear/inconclusive test that gives us no new info.

The good news is that there were indeed two blips on my EEG (yay!). They both happened while I was sleeping, and they were each only about 2 seconds long. 

Here's the weird part: they both happened in a different part of the brain from what we expected. 

Everything until now has pointed to my temporal lobe--especially my symptoms, but also my PET scan showed my temporal lobe affected. 

These blips happened not in my temporal lobe but in my cingulate cortex. Dr said, "I wasn't expecting that!"

He said that sometimes the cingulate cortex seizure activity can mimic temporal lobe seizure symptoms. I'm not really sure why this happens (need to go down that google rabbit hole!). So it's not unprecedented, but is apparently unusual. 

What does this mean? At this point, it doesn't really mean anything except that it's another piece to the puzzle. We have this piece pointing to the cingulate and we have the PET scan pointing to the temporal lobe, and without more testing we can't know for sure. 

More testing. I knew that was coming. I've already been on the list for an in-patient stay at the epilepsy clinic at VGH. Hopefully once that happens, there will be enough pieces to decide whether surgery is an option (I also want to ask about RNS... but that's a story for another blog post!). 

Dr was very careful not to speculate too much about this finding, but given what I know of him, I think this will be the type of thing that will interest him and hopefully give him a puzzle to work on. I'm not your typical TLE case, lol. 

For now, I keep taking my meds as normal, keep tracking everything, follow up in 3 months.