migraines and nocturnal seizures

[aurora2000]

I have been suffering from intense head pain for the past six years.  I never had a headache in my life until I was 27 and I had the worst headache of my life, which lasted 18 hours and had me immobile on the couch and was so intense I had what I describe as a near death experience.  After that experience, I suffered recurrent headaches, lost my ability to do math (I have since rehabiliitated myself and re-learned math in a new way) and often had weakness/numbness in my right leg or right arm as part of my headache experience.  At times, the weakness lasted for many weeks after the headache ended and the muscles of my right leg atrophied.  (I've since rehabilitated that leg by doing exercises to strengthen it.)

Okay, so now I am 33 and it is six years later, I have relearned how to do math and put my life back together after these headaches have severely disrupted my life to the point of losing my home and all posessions and even being homeless for a period of nine months during a period of extreme mental confusion.  My headaches have suddenly worsened this past February from a relatively livable number of headaches per month to pretty much a constant headache that does not go away but simply varies in intensity.

My headache has intensified to a deep pounding only on the right side that gets worse when I lay down horizontally for rest, and becomes so painful that I have even gotten to the point of having to sleep sitting up indian style or with my head leaning all the way forward.  In February, I also started having nighttime sleep disturbances which would wake me from sleep about two hours after having fallen alseep, where my right toe or right foot would be spasming or sometimes my right thumb or right hand would be spasming uncontrollably.  A couple of times, my head was spasming, nodding up and down in a "yes" motion.

So, I went to my neurologist and basically had a bunch of tests. MRI negative, MRA/MRV negative  An at-home EEG at that time showed "rare sharp waves at the right parietal area with some episodes.  other episodes appear to be arousal related".  I asked my doctor if I had epilepsy or if I was having seizures and he wouldn't or couldn't tell me, and that is my real question here: am I having seizures?  Is it possible to have migraines so bad that they can cause you to eventually have seizures?

The really troubling aspect of the nighttime sleep disturbances was that they would not let me get any real rest, as I was waking up at least five times a night and I found myself quite exhausted after them, with a particular type of neck pain and memory loss that also told me this was not the usual headache I've been living with for the past five or six years.  I started on Topomax (topamax) in March not long after that EEG and found some reduction in the sleep disturbances, but also found that I suffered as much from side effects as I did from sleep disturbances (i.e. memory loss, confusion, difficulty concentrating, weight loss, extreme anxiety, depression, fatigue, agitation, difficulty expressing myself verbally) and eventually had to take time off from work.

I would appreciate any input, thank you very much.

[Shmily1969]

migraines can get so bad that they can cause seizures, my neurologist has told me that.  Have you been diagnosed with parietal lobe epilepsy, because it's probably not the migraines causing the seizures, it's the parietal lobe seizures causing the migraines.  I think that's what's happening to me too.