Welcome to my blog! My name is Allison, and I among other things about me, I have epilepsy. Primarily, I have absence seizures, but once every few years I still have a tonic-clonic seizure. I’m going to tell you a little bit about how I got here, because it ties directly into this blog.

My parents first brought me to a doctor when I was six years old. They’d noticed my absence seizures and correctly assumed that something wasn’t right. My pediatrician, however, told them I was just a space cadet who was in my own world and that I’d grow out of it. So for the next ten years they thought I just didn’t want to listen to them.

Around freshman year in high school, a girl who I’d gone to school with pretty much my whole life came up to me and said “you know how you have those staring spells where your eyes roll up in the back of your head? I think you have epilepsy, you should see a doctor.”

I’ve been called stubborn once or twice in my life, so not only did I ignore her, but I didn’t even look into it. In my defense, this was before the days of google and smart phones. About a year later, my tongue started twitching along with my seizures. I mentioned it to my (new) pediatrician and she sent me to a neurologist. Turns out I was having upwards of 120 absence seizures a day. A year after that I had my first tonic-clonic.

The first thing I did when I was diagnosed was ask about flashing lights. Part of why I’d ignored my classmate was because there was a ride at a local amusement park that was essentially five minutes of strobe lights. I was convinced that there’s no way I had epilepsy if I’d ridden that ride and not fallen over, frothing at the mouth. I didn’t even know absence seizures existed, let alone that only 2% of seizures are caused by flashing lights.

So that led me down a rabbit hole. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one with this misconception. And how was this viewed throughout history? As an avid reader, I went looking for some books to learn more and was disappointed at the lack of literature on the subject. So I decided I’d write it myself. Enjoy, and feel free to let me know if I’ve overlooked something, made mistakes, or if you have certain topics you’d like me to cover!