Whenever possible, refuse to go to the ER, unless your seizures are repetitive out of control seizures, because they can do nothing more for you in an ER than friends or family can: simply making sure that you do not harm yourself with the fall (if lose consciousness) or something else done during the seizure. Nothing can be done to speed to the conclusion the average seizure, and few seizures can be brought to an end with the injection of some form of medicine. In fact, if you are already on a series of anticonvulsant medicines, then they can cause more trouble by adding more medications into your body without knowing everything that you are on. It should be a priority for you to get a Medic Alert (or similar company) ID that can help the medical staff to find out everything that they need to know about your type of seizures and medications you are on by using the phone number on the tag on your necklace or bracelet to contact Medic Alert.

Have some slack for the nurses because they only have a single course on seizures and the focus is on grand mal seizures and the potential causes of seizures (besides epilepsy) and what to do for someone who is having a seizure. Doctors get more training and neurologist get even more training, but the first neurologist diagnosed me with fainting spells, the next neurologist (10 years later) said that it could not possibly be seizures because I was not losing consciousness (like grand mal); he diagnosed it as panic attacks and sent me to a psychiatrist. It was not until 8 years when I had a seziure while doing a computer programming exam (Java language) and had physical evidence how my memory of the code and procedure disappear down to the level of a blank line (code consisted of a series of IF THEN loops to properly sort and filter out the data that did not fit the criteria). When I went to the treatment service on campus, a psychologist ask me to describe symptoms and remembered events which he used along with medical books to diagnose me with Complex Partial Seizures (which has auras that are actually Simple Partial Seizures). They are the most common seizures but vary in specifics based on individuals. My seizures are actually range from staring, halucinating and speaking with material from my subconscious mind to repetitive actions to even occaisional grand mal seizures. The major challenges come when I have had a complex seizure without an aura, and thus have no memory of the lost time of the seizure and no clue that I might have had a seizure.

Ugh, this is SO annoying. I experienced this recently and it's honestly the worst. It really eats away at me and I'm kinda phobic of hospitals too at this point.

I think a lot of us have. The hospital where I saw my neurologist even accused me of looking for drugs once! I was brought in by ambulance after a GM that time.
The ER staff even messed up and incorrectly wrote out a script after they claim they checked my record. I was on TegXR at the time. Staff wrote out a script for Carbatrol wrong strength, wrong quantity, wrong dose for me to use. I noticed that when leaving and immediately walked up to the 6th floor (Neurology) and showed it to the nurse. She said I should bring it to where it was written, but since it had so many errors she ripped it up and wrote out a correct one!

To the hospitals: no we are NOT trying to get more of the damaging drugs we must take to control our seizures. We don't want to be doped up and overdosed by you. We can't prevent every seizure from happening!!

I`v dealt with that a lot ... Every time they came to get me ..It was a wast of medicare ,and medicade money .... Unless it`s one I`m in more than a hour .... Dealing with three tip`s of seizures . Can be a pain in the ass .......

In defense of the MDs, they are not famaliar with all of the hundreds of seizure types and thousands of possible variations on those types. A neurologist, on the other hand, is supposed to remain up to date on everything about seizures. However, I had a neurologist after my first or second witnessed seizure (don't remember which one inspired my mom to finally take me to the doctor) call them fainting spells that would go away by the time I graduated high school. Years later when I was severely stressed at a warehouse job (before I went back to finish college), and I went to a neurologist, this neurologist either misunderstood what I was telling him or really was incompetent. He told me that because I was not losing consciousness (grand mal) as opposed to lost time (subconscious taking over during other seizures), that I was actually having panic attacks. He sent me to a psychiatrist who had me working with a therapist (useful therapy, but no medicine to treat seizures). I had some more when working in a factory (actually lucky that I didn't lose an arm within the press that heats and molds the rubber into the handles for golf clubs) another worker in the section stopped as she was passing and told me when the seizure was over to go to my doctor and tell him that I was having seizures (she was familiar because her husband had a seizure disorder), unfortunately at the time I did not have a doctor.