Original post – May 29, 2013
I am in Tennessee now. Quite a change. Something is making me write; I just don’t know what. Nobody is reading this.
I was diagnosed with epilepsy when I was 8. I went through many, many different kinds of medications and treatments. Even though I had (and still do have) epilepsy, as a child my family never kept me in a bubble. I rode horses. I went on motorcycle rides. I never saw myself as disabled. It annoyed me to no end when I had breakthroughs.
I started having complex partial seizures around 13. I remember an incident at a grocery store: the clerk was handing me my change and I just looked at her while she kept saying “ma’am.”
Well, I was 30 then, and I had been completely seizure-free for 4 years.
——————————————————
Update: 12 years after that first post (December 2025) I wrote this when I was 20. I’m 43 now.
Back then I was celebrating four years without a grand mal. Today that number is sixteen. Sixteen years without a single grand mal / tonic-clonic since 2009.
The complex partials and little blips still show up once in a while (they’re quiet, short, and I hate admitting it), but the big, scary, fall-on-the-floor ones that used to knock me out cold? Gone. Sixteen straight years of nothing like that.
I swallowed every pill they had in the 90s and 2000s, got the VNS put in at 16 when it was brand-new, dropped straight to my butt brushing my horse on a perfect sunny day, had full grand mals in grocery stores and parking lots, zoned out while cashiers yelled “ma’am”… and still climbed right back on horses, still rode on the back of motorcycles, still lived like the seizures didn’t own me.
Sixteen years without the monsters. That’s a win I’ll take.
If you just had your first grand mal, or you’re a parent watching your kid go stiff and blue, or you’re exhausted from the big ones that keep coming back: listen. They can stop. They really can. Mine did. You’re allowed to fight for that same silence.
Still here. Still riding. Still me. And the grand mals lost.
