What is Tonic-Clonic Seizures

What is Tonic Clonic Seizures

If you are a person like me who dealt with tonic-clonic seizures for over 20 years. What are tonic-clonic Seizures is a question you will ask yourself a lot. My name is John am a certified peer recovery specialist who has dealt with epilepsy for the last 34 years.

Two things I would like to point out.

1. Tonic-clonic seizures used to be called Grand Mal seizures.
2. I dealt will them for 20 years until for one year they turned into flash seizures and then I went into remission with my epilepsy seizure disorder. In the blog post Epilepsy: My Story I explain that in more detail.

My seizures again were the tonic-clonic seizures which are out of the Generalize category of seizures caused by epilepsy. My seizures were seizures where my whole body would lock into a position and then start shaking out of control.

Doctors call this extreme muscle spasms. I was diagnosed with having these seizures because of brain damage. My doctors never found out the cause of the brain damage. Only that it was there and was the cause of my disorder.

For me, my side effects of seizures were usually an extreme migraine the next morning. Thankfully, I had seizures at night most of my life. But the symptoms of these extreme migraines could not be stopped because it was caused by seizures and my brain was in the process of trying to heal.

I always dealt with sleepiness or drowsiness. Both could last for hours and were one of the problems I had regularly because of getting up early for school after having a seizure the night before.

But here is a list of more types of seizure side effects. Specifically common for Tonic-clonic seizures

1. Confusion
2. Feeling sleepy or drowsy for 1 hour or more
3. Loss of memory
4. Headache
5. Weakness of one side of your body for a few minutes or up to a few hours.

In the future, I will have to go over this because the damage done by my seizures was one of the key reasons, I had a learning disability in school.

I like to say remission because they stopped happening for me but there are many ways to trigger seizures to return.

Here are some things that can happen and some did happen to me.

1. Car crashes or other events that cause brain damage.
2. For me drinking caffeinated fluids
3. Rapid flashing lights
4. And many more

I would like to point out that even if you get a diagnosis with epilepsy and with tonic-clonic seizures remember that there is medicine, treatments, and procedures that can help lower the side effects and frequency of having seizures. Or being like me and putting your seizure disorder into remission.

(This is an informational and personal experience article only and it is best to talk to your neurologist, nurse, or local doctor for more specific information on your diagnosis.)