Epilepsy
News & Opinion
Latest News
In this episode, we talk about:
Superhero, Robert Reich, 80, revals he was diagnosed with epilepsy 40 years ago
We talk about luca, the sweet, brave little boy featured recently in the washington post
Health & Lifestyle
Arkansas Will bolster services for kids with disabilities after public outcry over long waitlist.
BY TESS VRBIN, ARKANSAS ADVOCATE
The move comes after families have taken to social media to highlight the waitlist and obstacles in receiving needed services, with posts that have been shared thousands of times.
The parents include Paige McCammon, who posted a Facebook video of her son Turner’s seizures on Sunday as part of the ongoing effort to bring Arkansas leaders’ attention to children with disabilities. Turner has severe epilepsy and a neurodegenerative condition.
Epilepsy is an invisible illness. This is what daily life with it looks like.
BY ANNE VAINSHTEIN, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Two years ago, Luca was diagnosed with epilepsy, a neurological disorder that causes recurring seizures, which are bursts of abnormal electrical signals in the brain. Symptoms can include a staring spell, a brief loss of consciousness, confusion, muscle limpness or even uncontrollable jerking movements known as convulsions.
Luca’s seizures consist of staring spells, with flickering eyelids and a loss of consciousness. His seizures can be triggered by flashing lights, or a lack of sleep. He’s able to control his seizures with medication as long as he takes it at the same time each day, morning and night. Though he has been seizure-free for over one year, each member of his family is on edge, prepared for a seizure to occur at any time.
From treating his epilepsy with weed as a teen, this 32-year-old is now a multimillionaire cannabis entrepreneur
BY HELEN ZHAOI, CNBC
At the age of 14, Joshua Haupt woke up in an ambulance. He was supposed to be in school, but he had suffered a seizure at the breakfast table. Later that day, Haupt was diagnosed with epilepsy.
That diagnosis eventually led Haupt down the path to become an entrepreneur in the cannabis industry. Today, Haupt, 32, is worth millions, including a 16 percent stake in Medicine Man Technologies.
Epilepsy Rights & Laws
An East Bay man had his first seizure while driving. When police arrived, they tased and arrested him
BY TALLULAH BROWN VAN ZEE, WASHINGTON POST
One afternoon last April, Hercules resident Jack Bruce was driving home on Refugio Valley Road when he lost consciousness.
Bruce, then 21, doesn’t remember what happened next. But two witnesses driving behind him saw his car drift right toward the shoulder, then topple down a 20-foot embankment into a copse of small trees.
Those witnesses would tell police that once they ran over to his car, they found Bruce slumped in the driver’s seat, unresponsive, sweating profusely and convulsing. He was clearly seizing, and they turned off the car and took his keys, they told 911 dispatchers and police.
Bruce was in the midst of a grand mal seizure, an incident that would precede him being diagnosed with epilepsy. Somehow, despite crashing into the trees, he was mostly uninjured before police officers arrived. Police body cameras captured what happened next, and Bruce filed a civil rights lawsuit Friday morning in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
Supreme Court win for girl with epilepsy expected to make disability lawsuits against schools easier
BY LINDSAY WHITEHURST, ASSOCIATED PRESS
A teenage girl with a rare form of epilepsy won a unanimous Supreme Court ruling on Thursday that’s expected to make it easier for families of children with disabilities to sue schools over access to education.
The girl’s family says that her Minnesota school district didn’t do enough to make sure she has the disability accommodations she needs to learn, including failing to provide adequate instruction in the evening when her seizures are less frequent.
Opinion
Everything here is our position, not our reporting — held to the same standard for facts, but making a case rather than laying out what happened. We write about the news when it deserves a response, about rights when they're being ignored, about living well when the advice on offer is useless, about resources when they're harder to find than they should be, and about where the money goes when the answer isn't good enough.
epilepsy & Universal Healthcare
If you have lived with epilepsy for a decade or more, you are certainly nodding your head right now. My 'Cadillac Coverage' (my term for the most expensive, top-of-the-line coverage) still didn't cover ambulance rides, which cost me $800 a pop.
You have a seizure at work. Something changes. Maybe nobody says anything explicit, maybe the schedule shifts, maybe the role gets restructured. And then, suddenly, you are looking for work again, with a condition you now have to decide whether to disclose, in a job market where you may not be able to drive to the interview. All while 100+ people are ready and waiting to take your role.
Hey Amazon…
Somewhere along the way, returning an item became something that required a driver's license. Drop it at the UPS Store. Bring it to Whole Foods. Take it to Kohl’s. Every one of those options requires the very thing that brought many of us to Amazon in the first place: the ability to drive somewhere. For a customer who can’t, a “free and easy return” is neither.
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