About Me

I was born epileptic. I have minor cerebral palsy, and a learning disability.  My first seizure was at 19 months.

I remember being aware that I was taking medication when I was five. I took a liquid cherry-like Phenobarbital before school, after school, and right before bed. A children’s version of Manischewitz . I assumed everyone was like that. I still ran around and played soccer with my friends.

 I felt like a 70-year-old for the first 26 years of my life. I was part of the first generation to be mainstreamed in the education system, and the very hours I was supposed to be awake and learning, I just wasn’t, thanks to the medications.

When I was in college, at 26 years old, I switched medications and had 8 grand mals in as many months. My friends and roommates didn’t know how to handle that, so my friendships were affected.

When you’re born epileptic, you have caution tape around your life.  While others were drinking, I was having a coffee. There’s a sense of always sticking out. A square peg in the round hole. 

Luckily my parents always told me I could do whatever I wanted, it would just take me longer.

After college I was planning my career as a writer. Over my life I’d written hundreds of poems.

Dating through an app is hard enough.  With a disability, if you get to the point of a phone conversation and you need to explain your disability, it’s hard to explain a fist as a right hand. They’re not expecting you to walk in with a limp.

The guys I met weren’t worthy of a coffee date.

I hit menopause at 45.  As any woman will know, your hormones affect your whole body. As a person with epilepsy, the hormones change your seizures as well. I was having more seizures by another force that I couldn’t control. I couldn’t get off the carousel of seizures and recovery.

I was in the middle of pulling together poems for a self-published book called Porgy’s Revenge.  It was a roller coaster in my body and now it was affecting what I loved. It seemed like each seizure took longer to recover from. If I wasn’t writing, was I still a writer?

Finally at 50, I was sick of looking over my shoulder. I decided to speak to my neurologist at UCLA. I refused to do another medication change- I wanted to do something more radical.  I was given two options. Deep Brain Stimulation – putting leads in my brain, but they could corrode. The other- brain surgery.

I took the one without the corroding leads. It took six months of recovery, but I’ve been seizure free for four years now.  I’m writing a YA novel.