I have “searched” for a cause for my seizures and migraines since I was 14 years old. I am now 51. It was a good thing I didn’t know I actually was having absence seizures at the time when I started that frustrating search because it would actually put me in the car the night I’d planned my suicide when I was 17. The day I was told after what felt like a million tests, migraines, and “we’ll figure this out together,” and answer after answer being the same, “we can’t find a reason for your migraines or pain,” but I’m sure we’ll get a treatment that works. And then nothing that they gave me worked. And then my seizures hit seven years later, but in reality I had been having them all along with the migraines but nobody had told me or my mother because of assumption of lack of ability to process or understand the information. After all, we were southern and mom was “too anxious.”
So now, I had migraines and seizures (tonic clonic, full involvement.) “No cause.” No, they are idiopathic. I corrected them with the calmest voice I could muster with my clinging 5 year old son in my arms (he’d just found me on the floor flopping like a fish two days before). I guess they get stuff like that a lot in Laramie from pharmacy students. LOL
It was after recovering from my first seizure and calming my son down (and husband) that I began the task of finding therapy that would allow me to get through pharmacy school, graduate, and build a career—with an idiopathic disease. You don’t always have to know why something is to live with it and do so successfully and with your head held high.