Yes, at least once. At least, the one I remember for sure, I had a sleep-study done (for one, I sleep like crap, in that, at least without some form of chemical assistance, regardless as to which neurotransmitter/receptor system is targeted, it takes me AGES to fall asleep. And without help I'd use most of the time intended for sleeping just to GET to sleep, 8 hours wouldn't be at all unusual or for that matter a long time, relatively speaking, in between first lying down, donning a blindfold and the likes and actually sleeping, assuming dosing quantity and timing of the various meds I'm on to remain at a neutral point (I.e neither sedation from E.g pain meds, antiseizure meds either providing a positive degree of tendency towards getting to sleep, or for those meds that have some sort of capacity to produce a withdrawal effect that would actively prevent sleep, any negative degree of same) or before I was on any meds, when I was a young kid etc. I'd still sleep like shit)
And also, my seizures are almost always (there have been exceptions, such as one or two when going two and from shops, fully up and awake, but usually not) 'nocturnal' (I use the term loosely, since I am pretty much a nocturnal creature by nature, here, its to be taken as 'sleeping, regardless of its being day vs night), and tend to either enter a warning phase (I didn't realize it at first, but with more events, I began to form an association between the two of a nightmare with a specific 'danger signal' content, something that would shit me up if I were awake, and now that I've done some psychedelic-catalyzed self-therapy working on issues of that origin then the PTSD-induced threat perception doesn't cause a fuck-ton of really nasty dreams based on the same type of issue, if I see it, especially if I do, wake up then go back to sleep again and it almost immediately recurs then now I can recognize it, with a favourable signal to noise ratio (I.e random presentation in dreamscapes of that threat-signal) as well as a kind of electric shock to the head sensation that begins early in the development of a seizure whilst its building itself up ready to let loose on me, then I can act quickly and if asleep, do my best now I recognize the association to drag myself out of sleep, which is usually, if I've just awoken and then near straight away drifted off back to sleep, when I restart sleeping (for a brief time, since I'll get a warning again, a confirmation of sorts, that the merde is about to have intimate relations with the ceiling-mounted air-recirculation system) then I now know that then is a very good time to hit the antiseizure meds' 'rescue pack', and squash the bugger before it gets unsquashable. (Sometimes when its a bit more progressed, and it starts with myoclonic type features I can, with difficulty, just about manage, if the meds are close to me, like on the table next to the sofa, manage to grab the bottle and throw it towards myself. Although if the seizure is the atonic type, or atonic-first then I'm buggered if I don't make with the squashing in a timely manner, since, like they sound like, atonic seizures result in a loss of muscle tone. I can breathe, SOMETIMES manage, if my old man is around, to push something off the sofa, drop my e-cig etc. to attract his attention, and use some of the little sign he knows, and ones I can make one-handed, albeit weakly since almost all motor control goes right out of the window, and if it happens whilst standing up, I'll just collapse like a rag doll, although I almost always remain conscious, unless I fall and hit my head against something hard enough to KO me; so I'll do my best to have some sort of sound made to catch his line of sight, then indicate 'want' and point and give the ASL sign for 'two' to tell him to grab the meds, and how many capsules to take out of the bottle and put in my mouth, as swallowing seems unaffected, or little-affected, but if not, then the atonic variety is essentially complete paralysis of voluntary muscle, and I go completely nonverbal, my head will fall down towards my chest, to the side etc. and I can't move my legs, roll over, move my torso, arms, head/neck. Only eyes, breathing, usually swallowing and in the more fortunate occasions, manage, weakly, to manage a few of the less-demanding ASL signs, as long as they only require one hand.
(no, not under a psych, I figured before taking up time someone else could use, and going through all kinds of hoops, time taken in getting appointments, and the fact that being autistic,
I am not exactly a people-person, that I might have more success if the therapist were to be me, working on me if that makes any sense, and that rather than a new environment, and potentially (of course since I didn't go that way, I don't know for sure, but gut tells me that I'd be a lot more comfortable with me working on me than somebody else poking around up there; in the inner workings of my psyche.
Compared to a situation where I could choose the environment and ambient conditions (I picked a particular favourite location, a little clearing with lots of soft, and importantly dry, leaf-litter to serve as arse-padding and somewhere physically comfortable generally, in a favourite forest, and for convenience's sake partly, and partly to both walk and ponder, and then curl up somewhere out of the way, close my eyes and go deeper in, could combine it with a hunt for wild mushrooms, so I could both work on issues as the primary aim, and during the walking here, there and everywhere to look for them, in the process bring me back something for supper)
As I was going to be hungry after a day spent mooching around in the forests and bending down to poke around in enough leaf-litter to last you a lifetime, leaving just enough time to pop into a little cafe close on the way back home to order some snacks and cold beers as a pick me up, rest my weary legs (in most of the PTSD-work, I'd be up and travelling before dawn so as to make sure; or at least give myself a good chance of nabbing any otherwise easily-located specimens of mushroom species that either make good eating)
Or in the case of the fly agarics that grow there and peppery boletes that come with them as a parasite, used in sub-psychoactive levels after heat-curing (raw, the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria is neurotoxic, but the toxin is heat-labile and converts to a somewhat unusually acting trance inducing/psychedelic/dissociative/CNS depressant psychoactive, so regardless of the use they have to be processed, although it isn't difficult to do, but done it must be, and anyone eating the things raw is going to regret it, although outside the scope of somebody either really being stupid and mistaking them for an edible, and eating massive amounts, children and some animals which are much more susceptible to the neurotoxic principle, or as a secondary effect, as has happened with people using them whilst camping in shitty weather, the trance leading to non-responsivity to excess cold, with hypothermia, rather than direct poisoning as the cause, it does not kill, or cause permanent damage, but will just make you pretty sick for a while. Nasty, but nonlethal)
I've been contemplating building an EEG sometime, since no harm can be done by it, given its a passive measurement, and wiring myself up to it before I turn in for the day to get some sleep, that way, rather than have what happened during the sleep-study (the damn seizures aren't predictable, and they don't really give a damn whether or not I've an appointment to look for iffy arsed spike-and-wave traces during sleep. If I built one myself, say, calibrated it with substances that would produce notable EEG changes such as a GABAergic CNS depressant, AMPAkines for excitatory activity, just to make sure that the thing is indeed recording data properly rather than producing traces of no value, then I could use it every sleep-period until shit happens, and has done so both several times, and ideally, of both the purely myoclonic variety, and the atonic variety or mixed, if I've not the fortune to be able to get to the meds fast enough and I end up paralyzed or too severely incapacitated by muscular jerking to manage to both reach for the bottle, open it and get some in me [otherwise I'd never let it get that far, not if I have any say in the matter, and I'm not willing to just let one play out from beginning to end and get as bad as it is going to get, if I have the ability to stop it, or have the old man help in getting the meds to me to stop it then that is what I am going to do)
I think I might have had more than the one (EEG that is), its not at all unlikely in the cases where a seizure has hit me really hard, especially before I had either daily meds to stop them ever starting, a further additional, smaller supply as a rescue/response pack of the same drug (chlormethiazole) and its landed me in hospital, that one or more will have been done in any one occasion; such as the times one has happened whilst I've been at the top of stairs, and the next thing I know I'm coming round in hospital, nonverbal and wondering quite what the fuck just happened to put me in hospital, or else have fallen on the landing and broken the bannister support sticks (now replaced with a solid sheet of plywood to prevent that happening in part, and in part to replace the missing bannister supports that ended up ripped out by a flying Lestat, diminishing the number of said supports, breaking them off etc. before I went to land with a crunch.)
So if I had control over the monitoring rather than having to rely on pure luck that shit happens, did (if that can be called luck) then through continuous monitoring I've a much better chance of getting the dirty details to hand over to a neurologist.
