Glad to find this site

[TBI]

Hi Everybody,

My daughter and I are both suffer from epilepsy and ironically suffered our first visible seizures one month apart. My daughter was born with a variety of developmental challenges and we were told that epilepsy was inevitable. For myself, I suffered a traumatic brain injury over 10 years ago and the doctors told me that epilepsy was a likely complication that I would encounter at some time or another. So the common denominator is that we both suffer from epilepsy but the seizures differ significantly.

My daughter - she is 8-years-old and can have 6 or more seizures a day for days in a row and then go two or three days without any seizures that we know of. Her seizures can be as short as split second to a little over a minute long and vary from absance, to partial onset to petit mal. Most of the time she bounces right back to normal but sometimes she is groggy and lethargic for an hour or more following the seizure. She is on three different Rx medications and they do not do enough to control her epilepsy.

Myself - I am 41 and have been blessed to have had only 1 grand mal seizure. All the rest of my seizures have been absance or auras. I was on Rx medication for years and the only thing it did was cause me to gain a lot of weight. After the grand mal seizure I found an epileptologist who introduced me to the VNS. I have had the VNS for over a year and a half and I am so happy to say that I have total control over my auras . I can swipe the magnet and stop an aura in about 30 seconds.

A couple of months ago the pediatric epileptologist implanted the VNS in my daughter and I am pleased to say that most of the time we can stop her seizures in 5 - 10 seconds . It will likely take months before we find out if we can decrease my daughter's Rx meds but I am conservatively optimistic.

I look forward to reading other members posting and hope that I will learn from everybody.

Karen

[wonderdogs]

Welcome Karen, and great news on the success of VNS to control yours and your daughters seizures!

[TBI]

Thank you...I feel that I have had complete success with the VNS but I am still waiting to see if the frequency of my duaghter's seizures decreases and if we will be fortunate enough to be able to reduce her meds. One step at a time!

[Birdbomb]

Wow! You both implanted and both with success! Good for you! Have you visited my site yet?

[RobinN]

Great news! I am glad that you found something that worked.

WELCOME to CWE.

[TBI]

Wow! You both implanted and both with success! Good for you! Have you visited my site yet?

I feel that my VNS is a complete success because I no longer take any medications and I only have auras, the auras on occur when I am under the weather and all of the auras can be controlled with the magnet. As far as my daughter is concerned, I feel that we are on the right path and I am optimistic that the VNS will make a significant improvement in her life. At this point we are only 3 months post activation and she is still taking 3 different medications. The good news is that most of time we can stop a seizure within 5 seconds of swiping the magnet. In addition, she is having a lot more split second seizures and fewer 30+ second seizures.

[TBI]

Wow! You both implanted and both with success! Good for you! Have you visited my site yet?

I'll go check out your site right now. Thanks. Bye!

[Birdbomb]

[Bernard]

Hi Karen, welcome to the forum.

[brain]

Karen!

Welcome to CWE! Hope you can learn
a lot from here!