Seizure Free After Surgery: Epilepsy Surgery Stories

Inside this volume

Fifty first-person accounts describe epilepsy surgery after medicines failed to stop seizures. Some waited almost twenty years before anyone said the word surgery; one was treated for panic attacks for six years, and another was told she was not a candidate until a larger centre looked again. They include a dairy farmer, a fruit seller who smelled burning rubber before every seizure, a chef, a librarian afraid for her memory, a literature teacher who lost the word for a spoon, a ranch hand eight hours from the nearest specialist, a nineteen-year-old who wore a padded helmet for years, a man who said yes at seventy, and parents whose baby and four-year-old each had a hemispherotomy, from Columbus to Lima and Osaka to Lagos. Writers describe ten days in a monitoring unit, awake mapping, temporal lobectomies, laser ablation, Gamma Knife radiosurgery, a responsive neurostimulation device, a vagus nerve stimulator, a corpus callosotomy, surgery for a tumour, a parasite cyst and crash scarring, family refusals, fundraising for treatment abroad, a lost patch of vision and getting a driving licence back. Outcomes differ: many are now free of seizures, one woman has about half as many, a farmer needed a second operation, one woman's surgery made no difference, and one man had a serious infection afterwards.

Who it's for

For anyone whose seizures have not stopped with medicines and who is wondering about an assessment, and for the parents, partners and siblings waiting outside the operating theatre.

Format · Instant download · PDF & EPUB · Fifty first-person accounts · PDF: 294 pages

A collection of personal testimony, offered as companion reading — not medical advice.

• 50 single-author testimonies from real people
• A short, plain-language introduction to the topic
• Editor's note, contents page, and curated resource list
• Professional interior typesetting and an original cover

Every purchase includes a print-quality PDF (best for desktop, tablet, and printing) and a reflowable EPUB (best for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, and phones). Files are DRM-free. You can download both instantly from the order-confirmation screen, and we email them to your inbox as well, so your books are always within reach.