Time for a trip down memory lane!- It’s now been 20 years since my epilepsy diagnosis. Two decades… it feels at once as if it has passed in the blink of an eye, yet the journey was long and arduous, giving me pause even now, as I say to my husband, How did we make it through?

 I can still feel the terror and apprehension as I stared at the neurologist, unable to digest the word “epilepsy”. I hear the doctor speaking, but I cannot digest her words.

I feel the bile rising in my throat and I fight the urge to run, to escape unbridled, to break away and find shelter; I long to morph into someone else’s life, to go to sleep and awaken, relieved that it was all a bad dream.

Tolstoy declared in War and Peace: “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.“

In my mind, I had NO TIME for this nonsense and I certainly had no patience. How I wish I could give a message of hope to the 23-year old me!

Face a challenge and find joy in the capacity to meet it”- Ayn Rand.

My joy was squelched for a season, but slowly I learned to roll with the punches, grit my teeth, and press on…or as the Navy Seals say, “Embrace the suck.”

Times of crisis bring out the best and worst in us, and I developed a thicker skin over the years, promising myself I wouldn’t become a prickly cactus, bitter and angry. I found my voice! and I can honestly say living with epilepsy has shaped and strengthened me.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.”– Winston Churchill

“You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry”–  Psalm 10:17