One woman’s epilepsy journey through childhood, parenting, discrimination, and surgery

This month on Seizing Life® author Laura Beretsky shares her decades-long journey with epilepsy, from diagnosis at age 6, through college, parenting, fighting discrimination in the workplace, and ultimately seizing control of her epilepsy via life-changing surgery.
Laura Beretsky experienced her first seizure at the age of 6 and was diagnosed shortly thereafter. Laura’s experience growing-up and living with epilepsy encompasses many of the issues we’ve explored on in the podcast. She refused to let complex partial and tonic clonic seizures impede her life and career aspirations. Laura attended college and earned her degree, began a career, got married, and had children while living with seizures and everchanging medications. When she beleived an employer was attempting to force her out of a job because of her epilepsy, Laura fought back against workplace discrimination. When she feared that a breakthrough tonic clonic seizure could endanger her young children, Laura began to investigate surgical options and ultimately underwent a temporal lobectomy. Though life-threatening complications severely impacted her recovery, Laura survived and has been seizure-free for nearly a decade. She chronicles all of this in her recently published memoir "Seizing Control" and shares the details of these experiences with us. Laura’s journey is one of persistence, self-advocacy, and determination to live well with epilepsy, and an inspiring story for those who live with this often misunderstood, stigmatizing, and challenging condition.
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[@normaquinn9346]

Laura I admire your optimism. I feel like you and I have followed the same path. We are the same age. I had an attempt at having a mass removed also right temporal lobe. I have cortical dysplasia. They discovered in surgery that they could not remove the mass because I was becoming paralyzed on my left side. The recovery took a couple of years. It has been 17 years since that surgery. They want to do another but I hesitate. It is not an easy recovery at all. I lost my math skills and also my job as a scientist. It is such a long journey. You have to be grateful for every good day and just accept that you will have a few bad ones. Thank you for sharing your story and your optimism.

[@davidbaltierra9531]

How do I get on this podcast?

[@tracythornton267]

I was told that I have refractory epilepsy had seizures since birth