I had to travel to Kelowna last week for an electroencephalogram (EEG). More specifically, mine was a “prolonged sleep-deprived EEG’. It sounds a little bit like torture, and it is… a little bit.
What is a sleep-deprived EEG?
Simplistically speaking, a sleep-deprived EEG is one where they want you to show up for the test tired, and they want you to sleep for at least part of the test itself.
The “sleep-deprived” part is a bit challenging for me. My current diagnosis of hypomania has a lot of words around the importance of good, regular, sleep and the necessity for sleep hygiene. Then along comes this EEG that says “Ignore all that: don’t get any sleep, stop taking all your sleep meds, and try to stay awake for about 24 hours before the test: what could go wrong?”
Well, it all worked out. I avoided one dose of my meds, the one that I know causes me to fall asleep promptly. From there I treated it a bit like handling jet lag on a long flight, with the EEG being the “long flight”.
I had a meal and a 3 hour nap, then around 1:00 AM on the day of the EEG I started forcing myself to stay awake. I had a cab drive me to and from the test, and when I got back to the hotel I ate my “dinner”, took my missed meds, and fell asleep for about seven hours.
After this I was a bit off schedule: waking up at 8:00 PM like arriving at the final airport. I had another smaller meal, took all my normal meds at their regular times, and went to sleep just after midnight. I then woke up the next morning at about 7:30 AM on the day of my drive back home, feeling pretty normal.
What’s the point?
As far as I understand it, all of the EEG testing for me was to look for evidence or lack thereof regarding seizures. So my EEG included strobe lights with eyes closed and opened, plain lights with eyes closed and opened, and the infamous nap.
I got a couple of naps during my EEG, and the technician said “good data” was collected. My guess is that the intent of the sleep deprived part of the EEG is to get a clear behaviour line for the brain when it is in a rest state. Are there any of the typical seizure-related electrical brain echoes or ‘storms’?
I don’t know the final result yet: the neurodiagnostics physician has to review the data and provide opinions. My hope is that there is no evidence of seizure behaviour in my brain. This would essentially eliminate temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) as a possible cause of my incident in December. And it would provide additional evidence in support of my current diagnosis of hypomania.
