Living With Epilepsy
How will severe epilepsy affect my everyday life?
Epileptic Seizures can strike at any time. They're unpredictable and so you have to be prepared. It can affect your life in many ways. Now holding down a job is going to be difficult. It's important to educate the people around you and also inform your employer about the severity of your epilepsy. Another situation involves driving a car. So you are basically going to have to live a more of a compromised life. However, the good news is that research is being done in the field of epilepsy at many different levels and I think that people will be able to live with this disease and have a better quality of life in the future.
What do I need to tell people about my epilepsy?
The things you need to tell people when living with your epilepsy is a very difficult question to answer. There are certain people who are close to you, family and very close friends you may want to open up and inform them completely about the fact that you have seizures; you do take some medicines to control the seizures, medicines might not be totally effective 100% of the time so they should be warned before that a seizure could occur. You may want to discuss with them the steps they should take if you do become unconscious in a seizure. For the general public that you come into contact with it's probably something you will not tell them. Over the years in the past history people with epilepsy were thought to be possessed by the devil and for this reason there is the stigma still attached to people who has this disease even though it's about 1% of the population. I think the more people know about it, the more people are going to be aware of how to treat people with epilepsy.
Can I still work if I have epilepsy?
With regards to living with epilepsy, there are jobs that you can work at and jobs that I would not recommend you work at if you have epilepsy. If you are working on an assembly plant line and there is some heavy-duty machinery, I would definitely not be encouraging you to work at that job. There are many, many different kinds of jobs that can be done by epileptics. In fact, some epileptics seem to display great creativity, and they should even be sought after by employers, just because they do have this creativity. So, I encourage epileptics to get those types of jobs and not manual labor, where you could be around heavy equipment, sharp objects, where if you did lose consciousness during an epileptic seizure, you could fall into some terrible hard structures and injure yourself.
Can I drive if I have epilepsy?
With regards to living with epilepsy, the laws about driving if you are epileptic vary from state to state. In the State of California, if you have had one seizure and gone to a hospital you could have your license taken away for several months. Though you might think this is severe, the state has this law not only to protect you, the epileptic patient who might have a seizure while driving and injure yourself, but it's also to protect the driving public.
Can I drink alcohol if I have epilepsy?
There are a lot of people who are taking medicines for epilepsy, for their epilepsy and these people will have an occasional drink. I think that most neurologists will agree that a social glass of wine at a social event is not a bad idea. I would not encourage and I think most neurologists will advise against heavy drinking for sufferers of epilepsy. It could also affect the medicines that you're taking. It might diminish their effectiveness in controlling with seizures. So I recommend a moderate to low amount of social drinking.
What is the relationship between depression and epilepsy?
When living with epilepsy, there is no direct relationship between depression and epilepsy. However, many epileptic patients get depressed. This is a serious neurological disorder that they are learning to live with; it limits a lot of their freedom. It limits the kinds of jobs they can do and limits their ability to get around in a car. So, I think that a normal person will get a little depressed over it and then there are the medicines which have a tendency to dumb you down a little bit. The word dumb does not mean intelligence, it really relates more to the fact that it slows you down. It is calming down your nervous system to prevent a potential seizure. As a result, people don't feel as awake as they used to and as happy as they used to. Therefore maybe taking an antidepressant together with your epilepsy medication might be a good thing, but only do so under doctor's supervision.
What do kids need to know about having epilepsy?
Kids learn a lot about how grandma has Alzheimer's disease, and they learn a lot about how their father might have a heart attack. However, other neurological disorders do not get the kind of press as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. Epilepsy is a disease that affects children, it affects teenagers, it affects young adults, and certainly it affects the senior citizens in our society. If one percent of the population has epilepsy and they are in a class size of thirty or thirty-five, and their school has one of these programs in a big auditorium, with a hundred and fifty kids in it, one of the kids in the auditorium might have a seizure during one of these meetings. I think it's important that children be taught about epilepsy.
Are there support groups for people who have epilepsy?
Support groups for epilepsy and for epilepsy patients and families are prevalent throughout the United States. There is the Epilepsy Foundation of America which is a very large nationwide organization. There are local chapters in the greater metropolitan areas. These are valuable. Not only do they help the epileptic patients find out that there are other people that have epilepsy, and they can share stories and be like a support group for each other. And also I think it gets the word out there as well. I think they raise funds for research and I am very appreciative of all that is done by the Epilepsy Foundation of America for supporting basic research in epilepsy. So I highly endorse joining these groups and supporting them if you are an epileptic or a friend of an epileptic.