A Case of Seizure Disorder and Pelvic Pain
By Dr Ifeoma Ikenzie
R.K. is a 50year old woman whose homeopathic care I have been working on since 1998. She was an art therapist who sustained a serious brain injury when a developmentally disabled client dropped a brick on her head from a second storey balcony. Subsequent to the injury she had memory loss and developed chronic intractable seizures. Her memory loss slowly improved over time but never returned to normal. But her seizures became worse over the years to the point of occurring almost everyday. She had been treated with numerous anticonvulsants with very little improvement and sought homeopathic treatment for the seizures. She also suffered from severe pelvic pain at ovulation and during her menses, which was felt to be due to large uterine fibroids. Between 1998 and 2004 I had prescribed Helleborus, Oenanthe crocata, Caulophyllum, Cimicifuga,and Zinc metallicum, with no visible improvement in her seizures or her uterine pain.
R.K. is an attractive soft spoken woman whose appearance belies her personality. Due to the brain injury her speech is slow and her facial expressions muted and she comes across as strange because her conversation is rather disjointed. Yet, she is extremely witty in her conversation and quite intelligent and observant. She is very well read in art, history, philosophy and is widely traveled and a wine connoisseur. She is extremely adventurous in spite of her brain disorder and she continues to travel all over the world alone with her companion dog who is trained to detect an impending seizure even before it happens. She makes friends very easily and is often off somewhere in Alaska or the Carribean or in Europe vacationing with whoever is the boyfriend of the moment. She will drive across the state whenever she feels like it to visit friends without anxiety about her seizures.
She describes two kinds of attacks, one in which she feels “ like I am drunk and I am staggering and I am seeing everything like in a kaleidoscope, and I feel like I am quaking inside and everything looks like an impressionist painting.” These attacks come without warning and are not associated with any visible external symptoms or behavior perceptible to others. But during these episodes she loses her orientation and depth perception. They may occur multiple times in one day. The second type of attack is usually an absence attack which sometimes progresses to a grand mal seizure.
In spite of my failure to find the correct remedy for her she continued to have faith in, and to seek, homeopathic treatment while still taking her anticonvulsants which were absolutely ineffective. In 2004 I read an article in an old edition of the Smithsonian magazine about the popularity of absinth in France during the impressionist era and the fact that the famous impressionist painters like Monet, Manet, Renoir, Degas, and even Van Gogh, frequented absinth taverns where they drank the green liqueur and discussed politics, art, history and philosophy. The description of the effects of absinth and the animated discussions of these artists brought R.K. immediately to mind.
There are numerous remedies for seizure disorder associated with disorientation with or without loss of consciousness, but the historical association of absinth with artists and philosophers stood out. In the book, 1001 Small Remedies, under Mind, is the rubric: Undertakes - anything - with anybody, and this was R.K.! It also mentioned uterine pain under female genitalia. So, I prescribed Absinthium 200c once daily for the first month. In that month she was seizure free and free of the drunken attacks for the first time for an entire month. After that we dropped the dosage to once weekly. Even though her seizures stopped, her uterine pain however, was unchanged, and she was advised to seek surgical treatment for the fibroids.
I saw her again a year later. She had gone almost 13 months without a seizure and had just had a seizure again. This time the seizure was different in that she had an aura prior to the seizure. She had never had auras in the past. This time she felt like she was removed from reality, sort of floating and LAUGHING before the seizure occurred. I prescribed Nux Moschata 200c once daily, based on the aura and the laughter before the seizure. She has gone 4 months so far without seizure and has had no return of the drunken attacks either. It was amazing for me to find the first simillimum from reading a historical article in the Smithsonian and the second simillimum based on the one peculiar symptom of laughter before a seizure. The moral for me? Read more widely!