Many people have outdated or mistaken views of seizure disorders — they imagine an incurable disease and patients convulsing on the floor. Family First looks at what life with epilepsy is really like plus how medical advances are helping doctors successfully treat — and even cure — the disorder.
A few hours later she got a call from the school nurse. “Your son had a seizure and he’s on the way to the hospital.”
“You must have the wrong person” Carole replied in a panic.
Driving to the hospital she started imagining every worst-case scenario. What could cause a healthy boy to have a sudden seizure? A brain tumor? A stroke? Cancer?
“I was a mess by the time I got to the emergency room” says Carole who lives in Albertson Long Island. “The CAT scan and MRI came back clean. That was good news. It was a huge relief that we weren’t dealing with a tumor. Rob played on the junior varsity football team. We wondered if perhaps he’d gotten knocked on the head. We had no answer. The doctors told us it was probably idiopathic — for 70 percent of seizure disorders there is no known cause. You want to be one of those because it means no brain injury but still this news was so shocking it was really hard to swallow.”
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