—By Melissa Beattie-Moss
You are at a conference, out to dinner with colleagues in the hotel dining room. Mid-conversation, you freeze with the fork halfway to your mouth. Your hands are shaking and you can’t hold your head up. The next thing you remember seeing is a paramedic standing over you asking, "What is your name? Do you know where you are?" Your head is full of thoughts but the few words you get out are garbled beyond recognition.
The next morning, you are still weak and foggy-brained, remembering only bits and pieces of what happened.
What happened, explains Jessica Gordon, was an epileptic seizure—her first major episode and the one that led to her being diagnosed in 2008 with a partial complex seizure disorder.
Gordon, a 32-year-old Penn State alumna and registered dietician, is one of two million Americans with epilepsy. She believes that the head injury she sustained in a serious car accident in 1996 is responsible for her condition.
It’s possible, say her neurologists, but they’re quick to point out that this is a disorder with dozens of contributing causes ranging from genetics, brain tumors and viral infections, to overmedication, Alzheimer’s disease and birth trauma. Pinpointing the exact cause is often difficult and sometimes impossible.
Getting a solid diagnosis can also prove tricky. The disease’s most common symptom—"loss or impairment of consciousness"—can be caused by so many other factors that physicians often take a watch-and-wait approach.
With over forty different types of epilepsy in the medical literature, this disease is more accurately understood as a group of syndromes with distinct symptoms, all involving episodes of abnormal electrical activity in the brain. How do you outsmart a foe you can barely define?
