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Do not try to stop the seizure

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Epilepsy. A scary word, full of imagined implications: shame, embarrassment, fear and anger. Yet so common a disease. If international figures hold up—and why should they not; the human condition is the same everywhere, we being more similar than dissimilar—one in every 100 Trinidadians probably is or has been epileptic. More, about ten per cent of people have had a seizure at some time of their lives, seizures being isolated events that do not recur. A seizure does not mean you have epilepsy. Epilepsy happens again and again so epilepsy is defined as recurrent seizures. 


Epilepsy or recurrent seizures happen when something goes awry within the brain, that huge, wonderful organ that we damage with medications and poisons and pollution, within and outside the womb. The reason itself we are born at nine months and not 18, as we should, able to run with our mothers… That brain controls everything we do or feel. The brain is divided into specialised sections or lobes that control every feeling or function from seeing to walking to thinking and smelling and feeling. It’s composed of specialised cells called neurons and their appendages, one to receive messages from other neurons and one to send messages.