Shannon’s Epilepsy
Shannon initially thought that her first seizure occurred in the eighth month of pregnancy with our first son Quinn, born April 4, 2005.

But she soon recognised that the feeling which precedes each seizure is something that she had been experiencing since childhood. These feelings are sometimes referred to as an “aura“, which are actually simple partial seizures or complex partial seizures in themselves.

With variable length and intensity, one or more of these partial seizures now immediately precede each of Shannon’s recurring tonic-clonic seizures — the kind where she completely loses consciousness instead of it just being affected. When the partial seizure spreads to more of her brain in this way, she ends up totally unconscious and having convulsions of the stereotypical type.

Some other notes:

• As a baby Shannon experienced a severe reaction to a vaccination, including symptoms that reportedly looked like seizures.
• No one recognised the recurring partial seizures while Shannon was young.
• Witness accounts describe an event in July 2002 that was probably the first of her generalised seizures.
• Below and linked are charts I made that show the frequency of Shannon’s full tonic-clonic seizures since 2005 (not counting partial seizures, which can occur with much greater frequency and are more difficult for me to record).

These charts are also posted at my phpBB — http://cbrunning.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=412 . If interested, the image files are actually located in my site images folder. I just put this forum link in because it’s possible that the charts may be more readable over there.