I had a grand mal last night on the sidewalk of a shopping plaza. (I'm fine. Not a scratch) I don't remember any of this, but my bf and friends told me how like 5 people wanted to know if help was needed (thanks), while a group of people stood there and laughed, one woman wanted to put something in my mouth for my tongue and was offended when told that's not what you do, while another woman made comments about how drunk I must have been to be on the floor like that, and then there are the people that just wanna watch. I think it's strange how so many different people react when things like that happen.
—Nicole Newbern
When I logged onto Facebook a couple weeks ago I saw this entry from a twenty-two year old Facebook friend who started having seizures—out of the clear blue—when she was nineteen. Since the day of her first seizure she's had between two and eight seizures a month—that she is aware of—from grand mal to complex to partial to absence. She's been on up to seven different antiepileptic drugs having to take them multiple times a day, plus anti-anxiety meds. She's lost jobs, battled disability, been unable to work or go to school or drive or ride the bus or be alone in public or drink. She's been terrified of taking showers in fear of falling and has essentially been prevented from "being an average twenty-two-year-old girl."
As a result she started a Facebook page, Nicole's Epilepsy, to help promote epilepsy awareness and to share the stories of others. Please go to: https://www.facebook.com/NicolesEpilepsy
Please share.
Give to cure epilepsy: http://www.calvinscure.com
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| Nicole's injuries after a seizure |
It is always interesting to see how people react to seizures--it's like an immediate barometer on how decent a human they are. After one seizure in the middle of a lecture on Teddy Roosevelt, a classmate trailed me in the hallway to ask me if I was alright. "I'm totally fine," I explained, "I have epilepsy and you saw me having a seizure." "You have epilepsy?" the kid responded, "but you're in all my AP classes." Needless to say, he didn't pass the decency test. I hope that in the future, my seizures will not test how decent a human someone is but merely how human someone is. We must continue to fight the misconceptions so that people will be able to access basic human compassion rather than be afraid.
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