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Author Topic: Alright then, guess I better follow the native cat-herd-Q&(perhaps)A with Lestat  (Read 881 times)

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Offline Lestat

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Title says it all.

Need a scientific answer to a scientific question? or just want to grill Lestat? or both...either ways, here is the place to do it.

No promises I'll answer fully and frankly ALL questions, but feel free to ask anything. No answer or refusal  to answer specifics is not admission of  incriminating behavior regardless of question, questioner or questioned; nor any combination of either the above or any other factor, party or both not otherwise specified.

That said, grill away.
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Offline renaeden

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Have you ever had an EEG?
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Offline Lestat

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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.
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Offline renaeden

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I know that it's possible to have a 24 hour EEG done in hospital (a member here - Peter has had one).

Having a seizure nearly every time you wake up is kind of something that should not happen if your seizures are under control, which it sounds like they're not. Your dad won't always be around.
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Offline Lestat

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It isn't that they happen nearly every time I wake up. Its that when a seizure happens, the timing is nearly always when waking up, two completely different things. I get some days when I just seem to be really ictally prone if that makes sense, when it seems determined to happen, those days, its just waiting for a chance, and often I'll stay awake, or else take a dose of nitrazepam or two that day (a really strong sedative-hypnotic benzo sleeping pill that has anticonvulsant properties, as well as a damn long duration of action), because the one and only weak point my antiseizure med, the chlormethiazole has, is the duration of effect, which is around 5-6 hours. So if I take it immediately before I go stick the covers over my head it can wear off if I don't wake up briefly (drinking a lot of fluid helps so I'll have to go piss at night and can top up with another capsule or two if I need to).

The problem is, any EEG to be done, is going to need an appointment unless they are going to lend me the machinery to take home, which I doubt, and the seizures don't happen every day, they are completely unpredictable, save for the typical timing they happen when they do happen, I.e waking  up from sleep, there is no rhyme or reason I know of for sure as to when those seizure-prone or seizure-infested days will be, I just know that when they are going to be, then when an individual seizure tries getting started (assuming I can't kill it before it gets going with meds) then the timing will be getting out of sleep. And even when I take the meds for it, if I go back to sleep then during these vulnerable days it'll hit me again as soon as I come out of sleep.

I can make myself a bit more vulnerable to them by going really, really low on my pain meds, that can be a trigger factor. I've been wondering about blood sugar levels too although I need to buy a test meter (I have asked and I can't get one on loan) and my venous access isn't great, so for an appointment for the fasting blood sugar tests they'd have to get a line in, and thats very difficult on me, hell, *I* have trouble finding a vein if I wanted to, as to anaesthesiologists with ultrasound assistance. So a diabetes monitor, would be far easier since I'd only have to prick a finger and use test strips and a digital monitor. I could probably use it for experiments afterwards  such as assaying glycaemic response to any of my little inventions too :P

So buying a monitor when I can afford to spare the money would be far more practical. I KNOW where my veins are, and they are just hard to get to, some covered by soft tissue scars, such as a near 5 inch wide scar down one forearm with a couple of other shorter scars next to it, and another in the crook of one arm where otherwise there'd be an easy vein to get to. But that scarring makes getting to the vein there both painful and difficult, even for me, someone with more practical experience with this particular, individual body layout than any doctor, since..well...since I happen to have lived in it for a bit over 30 years and I know which bits of me like to hang out where, if that makes sense :P

So, Ren, they don't happen daily, its just that when a day comes along where I am very much overprone to seizure, the timing will almost invariably be coming out of sleep, just before or just after then. The chlormethiazole does do a really good job, both of controlling the fuckers, and of cutting them short when I use a portion of my rescue-pack (same drug, just more of it than the stuff I take daily for prevention for use when fighting one off)

And its unusually forgiving in certain ways. Whilst more toxic than most antiseizure drugs in that an overdose is much more easily lethal than any but the barbiturates, chlormethiazole has allowed me to take it 3x daily for YEARS without producing a physical dependence on it and a withdrawal if I were to suddenly stop. Yes, if I did I'd get more seizures, but not from withdrawal, rather, from the removal of the protection it provides when it is in use if that makes more sense.

And for a GABAa agonist, that is almost unthinkable, for any drug in such a class NOT to produce a physical dependency and at that a real nasty bastard of one, its shockingly forgiving at least in me, in that respect. Also, its both very effective, and VERY fast-acting. A minute or two after a swallowed capsule actually bursts open then it'll be doing its job. Which for a non-injected drug is fucking fast, alcohol as spirits is perhaps the only drug that by mouth, and assuming in either case a dose sufficient to be both active and felt, I could compare the speed of action to that I've ever tried. The sheer speed of it, the shortness of the time taken for it to start to work on me after taking a dose is nothing short of astonishing. Perhaps even faster than alcoholic spirit, although I avoid it usually since more than a little gives me a nasty seizure aura-like head-shock sort of feeling and I don't drink much, and prefer other substances both for sheer preference and for safety's sake.
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Offline renaeden

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Have you read any books about autism?
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Should Human Beings, and Koi Fish Co-exist peacefully?

Offline Yuri Bezmenov

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Koi fish are secretly plotting the overthrow of humanity.

Kill them all before it's too late!!!   :tantrum:

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Koi fish are secretly plotting the overthrow of humanity.

Kill them all before it's too late!!!   :tantrum:

 :laugh:

Offline Lestat

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Ren-yeah, I have, I've a copy of..bugger..got to go find it now. Can't remember what its called..ah,  found it. 'autism spectrum disorders, the complete guide' by some fucker by the name of chantal sicile kira. Quite honestly, i'd call it a (very) mixed bag. Too much curebie shite in there, but some good advice and (possibly) contacts for parents (its not exactly new) so some of them might well be outdated as hell. And 'freaks, geeks and asperger's syndrome' by luke jackson, which kid or not (the author) I preferred, for its insider-looking-at-outsider (in a sense, in that he has classically autistic relatives, aspie himself, and neurotypical family members also, so a wide range of perspective)

And while it was up 'the rettdevil's rants' blog. THAT was HILARIOUS at times.
Beyond the pale. Way, way beyond the pale.

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Offline Yuri Bezmenov

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How many people do you think read your walls of text?

Personally, I can only read the first few sentences, then I just glance over the rest of it.

Do you use talk-to-text or are you actually typing all that out?

If you cut out all the tangents and word salad, your posts would become a LOT more readable.

Offline Lestat

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Last post was scarcely a wall of text.

And sometimes with my memory issues, it gets a bit difficult writing at times. Hoping that finally, after over 5 years what needs to be done about that, is going to BE done. I already have a fix for the problem, difficulty was getting support for it from my GP (I'd far sooner NOT put my  trust in some bloody eastern european pharmacy etc. and besides I can ill afford to) to say nothing of timing shipments.

I know it works. But, its taken me 5 years > to get a GP on board. Finally have done, now he's working on cracking a specialist's nuts so to speak to get me on it (memantine, if you were wondering, helps a LOT)., he's on holiday atm for a week or two, but, its getting pretty close, it seems. If it falls through then fuck it, I've decided I'm making my own. Even if it means starting from scratch, and knocking up a pound or two of the stuff, to avoid having to 'refuel' for more enough time to get it done and cleaned long before lot one runs out. At least then I know I can trust my own work a lot better than anyone with an interest in selling me anything.

And call me paranoid, but online pharmacies, well, they ain't exactly the kind of fuckers I SHOULD be inclined to trust, no?
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Offline Yuri Bezmenov

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You didn't read what I wrote, did you.

Offline renaeden

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Ren-yeah, I have, I've a copy of..bugger..got to go find it now. Can't remember what its called..ah,  found it. 'autism spectrum disorders, the complete guide' by some fucker by the name of chantal sicile kira. Quite honestly, i'd call it a (very) mixed bag. Too much curebie shite in there, but some good advice and (possibly) contacts for parents (its not exactly new) so some of them might well be outdated as hell. And 'freaks, geeks and asperger's syndrome' by luke jackson, which kid or not (the author) I preferred, for its insider-looking-at-outsider (in a sense, in that he has classically autistic relatives, aspie himself, and neurotypical family members also, so a wide range of perspective)

And while it was up 'the rettdevil's rants' blog. THAT was HILARIOUS at times.
Haven't heard of the first one but I have "Autism" by Uta Frith. That's an old book but still good.

I recommend some fiction - "The Speed of Dark" by Elizabeth Moon. Thought provoking story about an autistic man.
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Offline Lestat

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Does 'the curious incident of the dog in the night time' count?

Its....a bit different. An account by a kid who seems to be HFA, or medium-FA, who finds their neighbors dog, stabbed to death with a garden fork. Father seems a bit of an asshole, several bits in fact,
and despite his father doing all he can to interfere, the kid traces his mother, all the way across the country from letters from his mother (who is divorced from the father, and the father kept her letters
hidden away from the kid), and jumps a train w/o paying, taking next to no supplies, not really knowing what he'd need for the journey, buggers off down to london, and tracks his mother down.

Kid is spesh as hell, but damn smart all the same, highly logical, enough to overcome his difficulties
through sheer determination. Succeeds in both tracking down his mother, and finding out who
killed his neighbors dog via more or less sherlock holmes-esque deductive logic.

I won't say who the killer was, so as not to spoil the potential for anyone reading the book.
But this young autie kid did it, and did it damned well. Smart wee bugger. AFAIK based on non-fictional
account of what  happened.

I recommend it. It shows things really well right through the eyes of a rather spazzy spazz, from his own account.
Beyond the pale. Way, way beyond the pale.

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