By 2021, in addition to the global health crisis we were in with the Pandemic, I was facing my own personal health crisis as well. I have had Epilepsy since I was probably about 5 or 6 years old, but over the last two years my seizures had been increasing in frequency and severity as the medications I had been taking for years seemed to be losing their efficacy. I was scared because there were very few medications I hadn’t tried left, and frankly I felt a bit like I was falling off a cliff into the oblivion of the unknown. Until I found out about a cutting edge procedure that people were just beginning to talk about, that was miraculously controlling seizures from implanting a device in the brain.

We were smack in the heart of the Pandemic, and for the first time, people seemed more open and understanding of my health struggles because everyone was struggling to some degree or another.

Family and friends wanted to know how I was doing and what was going on with my health, but it was too exhausting to tell everyone individually, so I began to write a family newsletter (emails), in an effort to explain what was going on with my health and why I needed brain surgery in May of 2021.

I would be the 7th person at Massachusetts General Hospital with my type of seizures, to get one of the these devices, but I was desperate so I was willing. The surgery involved placing a device in my brain that would hopefully start to reeducate my neural pathways so that it would not only detect my seizures, but would eventually begin to avert them before they started.

I am sharing these with you because now, looking back, they’re kind of fascinating, and because I was the seventh person with my kind of seizures to get this procedure there was no one else I could turn to for advice or just learn how someone else got through the same thing because there wasn’t anyone else.

These newsletters are a kind of time capsule of my process, and maybe by putting them out there, it will help someone else to know that they are not alone.