Night Sweats // Lamotrigine
I'll preface this post with a warning that even though I'm not going into nitty-gritty details, some people might consider it to be gross and TMI. I don't think that's the case but you never know what other people think.
Early Tuesday morning I woke up completely drenched in sweat. My pyjamas, my side of the sheets - soaked. I didn't feel particularly warm when I woke up, I was just sweaty all over. I don't know why this happened, because the room wasn't hot - we have an air conditioner running during the hot weather and I'd say that it was comfortable. And yet, sweat.
This isn't the first time it's happened, and it's probably tied with the worst I've experienced. Usually it's not that bad, I will notice my legs are sweaty. But this is my night sweats at their worst. I don't think I've ever experienced this growing up, except maybe if I was sick. But there's a rational explanation for that because my body would be running hotter than usual.
Now, I'm 99% sure that there's nothing seriously wrong here, it's just something that happens. But there's 1% of my brain that is worried about whether or not I had a seizure during the night, since most of my seizures are nocturnal - and I'm unconscious during my seizures anyway, so how would I know? There are enough reasons to doubt that it's because of a seizure, the chief among them being my wife would have woken me up and told me that I had one. She didn't wake up, so I should be reasonably sure that I didn't have one.
But when you're living with epilepsy, some of the things that people might consider "normal" or "not concerning" are met with quite a lot of concern. So even after I managed to convince myself I was OK and that I have nothing to worry about, I turned to some surface level research.
I consulted /r/epilepsy and searched for night sweats. There were more results than I would have guessed, and the common denominator in all of them were mentions of taking Lamotrigine - a drug that I currently take (along with the generic version of Keppra). There were other medications mentioned but I would say 100% of the posts I clicked through, the OP mentioned that they either just started Lamotrigine or had been on it for a while. Other nighttime-related things were mentioned too, such as extremely vivid dreams and nightmares1.
I did some google searching to get some results outside of my epilepsy echo chamber and found one result from /r/bipolar, which also mentioned Lamotrigine; this isn't surprising since many anti-epileptic drugs are also used to treat various forms of depression, such as bipolar disorder. So, another checkbox on similar symptoms.
It took a bit of searching but I finally found a list of side effects that included sweating - something I hadn't noticed before when I looked up the side effects of the drug. Granted it doesn't explicitly say "night sweats" but I think it's safe to include that in the overall category of "sweating".
I think my concerns are appropriately assuaged for now, enough that I'm not going to bother placing a call to my neurologist to ask about it. But it would be nice to know ahead of time about these side effects. The only thing I was told to watch out for with Lamotrigine was for a skin rash, at which point I was to stop using it right away and call them. Thankfully, I have nothing like that, just these stupid night sweats.
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I haven't had any in a while but I've definitely experienced the most vivid dreams I've ever had after starting my epilepsy meds. No nightmares, though.↩