confused by neurologist

[pepper999]

Hi. Just got back from our pediatric neurologist. I am confused. Here's my son's story. He fainted, fell over straight like a log on his face, cracked his orbital bone and had a severe concussion at 15. This was at the doctor's office. The nurse who observed him jerking on the floor said it was a reaction to being knocked unconscious. He was a fainter when he was younger but hadn't fainted in years. However, we have had a lot of big stresses in our family and he was probably more stressed than usual.

About 6 months later he fainted at my sister's house when she was describing something disturbing she saw at work (she's a nurse and tells these stories a lot). I did not see that faint, but found him lying on her ceramic tile floor. He woke up quickly that time with no evidence of head injury. About a year later, he fainted after he got bit by our hamster. That time I caught him. He was stiff and I had a hard time lowering him to the ground. His arm jerked when he was lying there. He woke up in less than a minute feeling like he was well rested. He has gotten lightheaded on several other occasions related to stress, but not actually fainted. He said he thought he might, but he didn't. He says things go gray before he loses consciousness.

My doctor sent him to a neurologist who did a walking eeg. They did not find seizures on the eeg but the doctor said it was unusual to find an actual seizure on an eeg. He stressed this quite a bit. He found a few spikes of activity (refused to say how many) while my son was asleep that he said could indicate my son could have a seizure. But he also said that 3 percent of all people have these brief spikes while they are asleep and never have seizures. So I asked him, IS MY SON HAVING SEIZURES? He said, yes, he was having frontal lobe seizures. I asked DOES HE HAVE EPILEPSY? He said no, he wasn't calling it epilepsy. I tried to ask for more details about the eeg and some other things he said, but he did not like me to ask questions and basically told me to just listen. Because I had to tiptoe carefully around his ego, I did not get the information I wanted, just the answers to those two questions.

One other thing, my son has Asperger's Syndrome and has poor emotional regulation, but otherwise most people would never know he has AS. It's very mild.

Can anyone tell me what they think about what this neurologist was saying? Are these faints? Seizures? If they are real seizures, why is the doctor saying he doesn't have epilepsy? I have searched and searched online and it seems that if he really is having frontal seizures, then he has epilepsy. I just don't get it.