Monday, June 1, 2009

Look At All The Pretty Colors

I had my EEG today, and hope to hear from the neurologist by the end of the week.

It was kind of a wild experience in some ways.

They had a recliner for me to sit in. There were 26 sensors attached to my face and head after the technician spent what felt like a long time measuring my head and marking with a red grease pencil in various places (including the bridge of my nose!).

Then I settled back in the recliner and answered a few questions: "What's your full name?" "Where are you right now?" "Count backwards from 10."

Then she settled a rectangular light just a few inches from my face and told me to close my eyes for the rest of the test. The strobe light went off for brief periods with different speed levels.


The rest, of course, was just sitting still and trying to relax with my eyes closed, which was harder than I expected. I kept listening for the tech's typing, which would come at what seemed like random periods. She also had water running in the room from a sink faucet, which just drove me nuts. :-)


Afterward, I asked her how many bulbs were in the lamp. She told me there was just one, a white light. But I saw color changes through my eyelids. It started out (through closed eyes) as a vivid red, then changed to blue and then green. And wow -- the patterns it made were fascinating. My favorite was a pattern of dotted curved lines, almost like flower petals, that moved, radiating from the center outwards. It was almost hypnotizing.

2 comments:

Miss Waxie aka A Comic Life, Indeed said...

Well I'm glad your EEG went as well as possible! I remember mine - much like that, the gross electrode glue and grease pencil in my hair, but that's the worst of it, really.

Of all the tests we go through, I'd take the EEG any day!!!

I've heard from a few people recently (as suddenly there's an influx of people I know getting EEGs, something in the spring air?) that they've had a hard time settling down during the resting part...which I found strange since I was so very tired for mine. They told me I had to stay up practically all night before my EEG, so I was fairly exhausted by the time i did it and found sleep easy.

Do they not tell everyone to stay up the night before hand? Did I just get special sleep deprived treatment? ...Cause somehow, I wouldn't doubt that with my luck!

- Miss Waxie
http://acomiclifeindeed.wordpress.com

Aviva said...

Nope, I didn't stay up the night before, and wasn't told to. I did read about that online though, that sometimes they have people stay up all night for some reason. Hm. Let me see if I can find a link about that again ... Here's something:

At http://www.webmd.com/epilepsy/electroencephalogram-eeg-21508 it says that "To find certain types of abnormal electrical activity in the brain, you may have to be asleep during the recording. You may be asked not to sleep at all the night before the test or to sleep less (about 4 or 5 hours) by going to bed later and getting up earlier than usual."

I guess they were looking for different types of abnormal electrical activity in our brains. :-)