James’ Story
My name is James, but I go by Jim. It first began back around 1987. I was giving someone a ride home from work when I suddenly found myself on the side of the road with this person next to me, scared to death, telling me that she had had to grab the wheel to pull me off the road. I'm looking at her like she's crazy because I had absolutely no memory of this. But I did have to stop and think, "Well wait a minute, what am I doing here, because I had really no reason to be on the side of the road. And what reason would she have to be making this all up?" It did become pretty clear to me that something I wasn't aware of had gone on. So that's when I began to believe it was true.
My treatment began, of course, with my regular doctor. He did early-on refer me to a neurologist and I went through a couple of years of treatment. Nonetheless, the breakthrough seizures kept occurring and we went through several medications and larger and larger doses trying to get it under control. Eventually this neurologist referred me to a specialist in seizure disorders. Looking back on it, I would say that's where true progress began. Tests were done to narrow down the origin. An MRI discovered a suspect area of the brain and some hospital testing captured and recorded seizure activity.
I had actually gotten to the point in my treatment that I was feeling very frustrated and starting to come to the conclusion that this might be it, you know there may be no way to really totally control this but my specialist really did hold out hope for me. She told me that many people had gone through similar periods in their lives with seizures and that new medications are coming out all the time. In fact I was very fortunate, because when it was discovered that my origin was in the right temporal lobe, that's when the option of surgery first presented itself. And ultimately I did have a right temporal lobectomy. It actually has been pretty much the end of my seizure disorder.
