My Unremarkable Brain

Epilepsy, exercise, diet… how does this all come together?  Here’s the short version of my story: how I became a middle-aged fathlete and human guinea pig. As I said, I’m a bit of weirdo, in that my seizures didn’t start until I was 28.  (Well, I’m a weirdo in a lot of ways, but let’s leave that for another time).  I sometimes call myself a “lucky epileptic.”  My family history — my brother grew up with epilepsy — meant that the doctors intervened with medication right away, and were able to get my seizures under control with the first medication they tried, and I was able to live normally and seizure-free for years.  This isn’t the case for many people.  Since getting more involved in this community, I’ve spoken to folks who have five, ten seizures a day, who have tried two and three medications to no avail.  So yes, I’m really, really lucky. Lots of other changes happened around that time, too.  I went from being tall, thin Dave to Big Dave.   I can’t prove that it was the

Last time, I shared a bit about myself, my purpose in writing this blog, and a few thoughts about life in the epilepsy closet. Okay , you might say, so what?  So why come out now with all this self-revelation stuff and make a big freakin’ blog about it?   Well, my pesky ol’ brain acting up, after being quiet for so many years, started to make me wonder, what’s going on here?  I made an appointment with my neurologist and asked that.  He just shrugged, “I’m not too worried about it.”  (Which is good, because foremost in my mind is the desire to not worry my neurologist).  He prescribed a larger dose of medication and said we’d take it from there.   Then I talked to my brother-in-law Romer, who is a neurologist himself, and one of the world’s leading specialists in neuro-critical care.  “What I want to know,” he said, his scientific mind clicking away, “is what changed?” What changed?  Good question.  He recommended that I push for an updated set of tests — an EEG and a

“My name is BigDave, and I am an epileptic”   1 So here’s the deal:  In 2003, I had a seizure.  This put me in a select group of about 9% of Americans who will have a seizure in their lifetime. In 2005, I had another.  According to the clinical definition , then, I have epilepsy. 1 seizure + 1 seizure = Epilepsy Whew.  Band-Aid: torn off.  This puts me among the elite 1% of Americans diagnosed with this condition (a one-percenter!).  I’ve had a couple of seizures since 2005, but overall my condition is very responsive to medication.  Maybe this is why I’ve been able to keep it to myself for so long.  For a long time, I could count in my head the number of folks who knew — they included my family, my roommates from New York, and my close friends from grad school.  The question is, why keep it to myself? Ian Franks, in an article in Epilepsy Today , writes eloquently on the hesitation that people with epilepsy have sharing their condition with others. H