some nights, erin mcdonald has a seizure in her sleep where she unknowingly gets out of bed and wanders around the house. she’ll often wake up with her pillow soaked from drooling or even in completely different clothes than what she wore to bed.
“things happen when i’m still completely blacked out, but i have no idea what i’m doing,” she says.
epilepsy, a neurological disorder of the brain causing recurrent seizures, poses an underlying threat to her daily life. the 37-year-old hamilton woman can’t drive, and rarely takes public transit alone. she lives at home with her parents for her safety.
“for most people, when they think of a seizure, they think of somebody falling and convulsing,” she says. “i have those ones, too, but mostly when people see me have a seizure, it seems like i could be drunk, but i’m in a seizure.”
for mcdonald, those seizures come in clusters of two or three a week, and can happen at any time of day or night, often taking 45 minutes for her to come out of and regain full awareness.
she’s lived with the unpredictability of epilepsy since she was six, diagnosed after she had a grand mal seizure at school and woke up in the hospital. grand mal seizures — now more commonly called generalized tonic-clonic seizures — are caused by the abnormal electrical activity throughout the brain that signals the central nervous system.
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