The journey begins

I was ambivalent about starting this blog. It is not easy to write about something that you know about, or more exactly, suffer from, intimately, but wished it never happened in the first place. It has been 25 years since I first exhibited symptoms of epilepsy.

Every person's story about the discovery or development of his/her epileptic condition is different. Nevertheless, they all share some common traits.

For me, I remember waking up one morning, rather puzzled and confused. My mother was there, seemingly trying to ensure that I was ok, but at the same time, looking very anxious and worried. I was no wiser what had taken place. My brothers tried to explain to me what had happened - that I was grinding my teeth and to prevent it from biting into my tongue, a spoon was used to protect it from my raging teeth. I learnt later that this was commonly done as folk remedy for this sort of thing. Somehow, I knew that something wasn't quiet right, but I didn't feel terribly unwell - only very tired - as if I had just been in a marathon. I was perspiring and breathing rather heavily. My muscles ached and I was confused. So I didn't talk nor ask anything by way of clarification , I just wanted to go back to sleep.

Eventually, I was sent to the hospital by an ambulance, where I remained for two weeks for observations. I was then 15 years old, for all intents and purposes a normal school student who had been very active in sports, except for a heart condition which I did not undertand at that time - but that's another story. Thus began my journey with a malady that, as I learnt later, was called epilepsy.