Most everyone who has seizures knows…memory loss can be a brutal side effect from both the seizures themselves and the anti-epileptic medications.

Repeated severe seizures can damage the underlying brain tissue. Thus, many individuals who suffer from Epilepsy show cognitive deficits, particularly memory deficits due to damage to the medial temporal lobe. Those of us who have suffered over time can certainly feel it. Whether it’s short-term or long-term, those memories just seem to escape us and ‘fall out of our brains’ as I have said. And, we begin to become frustrated and in some cases, depression can set in.

So, how do you make sure you stay sharp and your memory can work? You must try harder, put forth a different sort of effort than most with a normal memory. After a set of surgeries, a therapist told me once to never leave home without a small journal or notebook. I’m supposed to ‘journal’ snippets of my day. Let me tell you…I can’t even journal my seizures for my neurologist, let alone my comings and goings in my day! But, I realized all too soon, that when I didn’t take her advice, I paid the price.

I began to write down names of people I met, tasks I performed; made to-do lists and even jotted down my accomplishments at work. I tracked my phone calls I made and received at work and dinners I cooked and those that were well-received by my husband and daughter (as young as she is!) This memory-push, as she called it, can work, if you maintain it. But, it takes effort, as does most of what we do. But, that’s what makes us unique!