Does this sound like a partial seizure?

[wigglybeezer]

DS2 suffers from a particular type of "night terror", often when he has a temperature, involving panic, disorientation and a feeling of his hands swelling up.

This week he has experienced the hand swelling feeling when awake, at school, accompanied by a weird feeling in his stomach and everything suddenly looking faraway.

This has happened a couple of times.

He has complained about visual things a few times in the past and was checked out by the opthalmic dept at the hospital, their is nothing wrong with his eyes (he is colour blind though!).

I am taking him to the GP tommorrow and am trying not to worry (been watching House recently!).

Really hope someone can help me with this, my gut instinct is saying something is up.
Its tricky getting him to describe feelings due to his AS but something about the way he described his "funny turn" at school set my alarm bells ringing.

how old is he wiggly?

10

I found out a couple of years ago - through battling with paeds and therapists of every description - that seizures of varying types are not uncommon at puberty (especially boys) of those with ASD and related conditions.

DS1 (now 19) started with them around your DS's age and continued for around 4/5yrs. having between 2 and 5 a yr. hes ADHD

DS2 has recently started with drop attack type things. hes 13 (but very young) and has ASD. we've had tests done and nothing can be found. So long as they dont change im not worried about it too much and hope he will grow out of it too.

This is not to suggest that you shouldnt have it checked up - i think you should, just wanted to say that its not uncommon.

Sorry, forgot to mention - I dont have any medical understanding about this whatsoever, this is not a medical based opinion.

Thanks toof, I remembered reading somewhere that seizures are more common with ASD, that's partly why I'm checking this out.

If they stay just sensory I'll not be too worried.

Interestingly, DH used to have the swollen hand "dreams" at night when he was little but grew out of it.

My ds has what the paed calls ASD related absences. He says they're not seizures, but are very common among children who have ASD. Apparently its thought to be related to them kind of zoning out either due to stress or sensory overload.

The paed wrote to the school to inform them that the absences will have an impact on learning and we know that he can miss several portions of a lesson at a time and completely lose track of the lesson and what he should be doing as a result of them.

In his case its like the world stops for a minute or so and he is a long way away from everyone, not seeing or hearing what's going on around him, but still aware of himself and his own feelings/body. Initially he didn't know he'd 'gone' but now he realises that he's missed what's going on around him and can also feel it happening.

He did 'drop' (into the lap of the girl sitting next to him ) once during a maths lesson at the beginning of the last academic year, but hasn't had anything similar since. We called the GP as soon as we found out this had happened and she got him rushed back through to see his paed.

I was a bit at first about the paed insisting he didn't need any further testing (other than blowing a tissue continually for a minute - which apparently induces absences in a large percentage of children with absence epilepsy) because ds1's first cousin also has AS and developed absence epilepsy at around the same age, also my MIL has recently been dx as epileptic following years of 'funny turns'. However, dh and I have watched him very carefully over the past year and not seen anything that would suggest absence seizures and the type of absences he does have don't seem to be getting any more frequent, so we have to trust them for now.

You are doing the right thing getting him checked over by the GP. Ours did a load of reflex checks on him, didn't find anything from that, but referred on to the paed anyway.