It wasn’t just a ‘bad’ day by Epilepsy standards…it was THE WORST possible day.

Here I was nearly ten months to the day post-Vagus Nerve Stimulator (VNS) implant, and I had been bragging to practically everyone I encountered about how great I was doing.

“I’ve gone months and months…and months without a grand mal seizure. Hell, I probably will never have one again,” I think I may have said that on more than one occasion. “Look at me, I can drown myself in sweets and carbs. Just as long as I have this little machine ticking inside of me to take care of those pesky little seizures, I don’t have to even think about taking this on myself.” Well…all that changed on Friday night.

You can call me lucky or you can say the device was simply working all this time. Whatever you want to call it, when I woke up feeling as if I’d run the Boston Marathon on Friday evening (and trust me…I’ve never before trained to run a marathon!), and I had a sweater that was stained with blood from the tongue-biting that had just happened, I realized this wasn’t my ordinary Friday evening with my husband and daughter. I was furious…aching and miserable. I wasn’t full of pity or shame. I was spitting fire. How could this happen?? I thought these were supposed to be taken care of–or at least ‘curbed’ with this thing that was now inside of me, activating and stirring my body to its core every two minutes? Now its giving me a grand mal seizure? How can that be? And…I’m still on my anti-seizure medications-full dosages, and this is happening? My language was not pretty to say the least. Don’t forget…I was a journalist for the first nine years of my career.

It took Andrew some time to calm me down, and to move me upstairs to our bed. Oddly enough, the grand mal seizure happened on the first floor of the house in the family room while I was sitting on the sofa. To those who are concerned, it didn’t phase our daughter one bit. Hayden told me later, ”it looked like Mommy was sneezing a lot!” Leave it to a 4 year old. All she wanted to do was wipe the snot from my nose!

I guess lesson learned from this Friday fiasco; I spent a great deal of time, too much in fact, furious with myself that I actually could succumb to the seizure and the amount of time during the weekend that was wasted on recovery (all of Saturday and half of Sunday). In reality, I probably shouldn’t have punished myself as much as I did. Self pity doesn’t accomplish much and it certainly doesn’t get the groceries in the fridge for a busy family!