The Emotional Toll of Epilepsy

It’s 8:15 on a Friday night, and we’re sitting in the Emergency Room of our local hospital. This isn’t our first Emergency Room visit, and it won’t be our last. I guarantee it. And it’s not that I mind being here with my sweet husband on this night, it’s that my heart breaks for him and what he’s gone through to put him here.

Adam has epilepsy, which developed after a tragic car accident when he was eleven years old. The words- which I have repeated to doctors, nurses, friends and family over the last six years- are easy to say. Traumatic Brain Injury. Seizures. Treated with medication. Triggers. They’re easy to say, but what’s not easy to convey is the all-encompassing, overwhelming existence that is life with epilepsy. There’s no way that anyone can fully understand or sympathize with the pain that my husband feels.

But we’ll get to that.

The reason we’re sitting in this Emergency Room is that my husband had a mini seizure- a “twitch” is what we have termed small spasms that drop him to his knees. This has happened before- but this time, when his legs turned to jelly, we were walking the dogs. I saw it happen- in slow motion, maybe- he looked twice and started to cross the street, and his legs were gone from beneath him. The leash clanked to the ground and the dog was startled. My husband fell hard onto the asphalt, and his head crashed against the street.

I rushed to help him up as a neighbor looked on from his driveway. The tears started flowing immediately, both of us. He limped home and as he was washing his face, he looked at me and said, “Some days, I just feel like giving up. I’ll never be able to do all the things I want to do. “  I didn’t want to upset him further, but this was the first time he articulated what he was feeling about his seizures- and I admit that I have felt it some days, too: Sometimes, the pain and reality of this horrible condition seems to be too much… insurmountable.

If I have learned anything from my husband, it’s to get up and keep going- every day. Adam always has a smile on his face, and it’s only in these rare moments that I see how much living with epilepsy affects him emotionally.

Adam is the strongest & sweetest person I know. Strongest because he continues to live his life without becoming jaded or sad about his circumstances or the situations he’s been through. Sweetest- because he wakes up every day with a smile on his face, and something tells me that no matter what happens- he always will.