Oh Fuck

[citrakayah]

So.

Today I was in Physics 203A. Physics 203A is, I might add, very boring. The instructor does a decent impression of a monotone and is generally the type of person who, while perfectly nice and decent, is also not the type of person you would want to teach a class.

I'm struggling to remain focus. I'm fairly sure I'm succeeding.

Then I suddenly discover that everything has changed and twenty minutes of passed.

I don't know what happened. That scares me, because I. Don't. Understand. Did I fall asleep? It didn't feel like falling asleep; while falling asleep I have perception of time passing. The case manager working with me things it could have been a seizure, but surely something like that... I don't know, it seems unlikely. And afterwards, I felt ill. Standing up was a fight, and my stomach was in rebellion.

Oh, and the same day I lost my wallet for a while and ran headfirst into a glass wall.

Comments

[crazy_raccoon]

I had a friend with epilepsy, and from what you describe... it sounds very similar. The length of time, though... that's very wrong.

An absence seizure, I saw one while playing DnD with a friend, and it's a little weird. Here's a video of what one looks like if you haven't seen it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obbg1BFt26Q

As you can see, the length of time is miniscule compared to a good twenty minutes. My friend didn't realize that time had passed, either. When he saw us all looking at him when it was over he figured it out easily enough. He knew he had the condition.

Only other thing I can think of is microsleep, something that affected me while I was in college. I lost a few minutes at a time, even in the middle of writing notes for class. I have pictures of what I wrote down that day in class, unintelligible gibberish that looked vaguely like a child trying out shorthand. My hand continued trying to write even after I fell asleep, and when I woke back up, I didn't know I had slept and kept trying to write the same note.

I had a vague sense that time was skipping forward, like maybe I missed a few sentences or equations here and there. I have no idea how much time I actually lost or how frequently, but it was a little disconcerting each time.

My friend sitting next to me said I didn't look like I was sleeping, either. No head nodding or eyes closing. Granted, he wasn't really watching me, but still. It's hard to miss stuff like that.

I hope you get good news.

[citrakayah]

Interesting. Don't know whether that was what it was like for me or not, of course, given that I was out for it, but at least it didn't happen again during the exam. It may have been due to dehydration, actually (thanks for suggesting that); I made sure to stay hydrated during the exam and it seems to have paid off. And the three test tubes worth of blood that was taken should prove enlightening.

Anyway, I'm going in for both an echocardiogram (turns out I have a heart murmur) and to talk to a neurologist.

[crazy_raccoon]

Didn't know they needed that much blood for tests. Wow.

Hopefully the murmur is harmless. I had one as a kid and upon further inspection they realized nothing was wrong. Just an extra sound. Apparently that's actually quite common in kids and teenagers.

[citrakayah]

Indeed. Rather shocking to me, too.