Surviving brain surgery

Brain surgery has completely changed my life. When I was asked to consider having brain surgery, I foundmyself faced with a huge decision. I would like to describe my experience of the whole process, in the hope that this will help others who find themselves in a similar situation. Although they were initially misdiagnosed as migraine auras, I had been having simple partial and complex partial seizures since I was about four years old. They were not correctly diagnosed as epilepsy until they started to develop into tonic–clonic seizures when I was 16 and started seeing a neurologist. I was prescribed a variety of beta-blockers and anti-convulsants in many combinations, but none of these seemed to control the seizures. None of the diagnostic tests I had – from what I remember, two EEGs, two CT scans, and two MRIs – revealed anything of any use. This was the way things were to continue for many years. Shortly before I turned thirty, my neurologist retired and with the help of Epilepsy Action, I persuaded my GP to refer me to an epilepsy specialist. Inmy very first appointmentwith him, hewent through my history and asked me to describe my symptoms in my own words. From my descriptions, he said that my seizures were almost certainly starting in the dominant temporal lobe and that this was likely to be the left, given that I was right-handed. He explained tome that, given howmany different drugs had failed to controlmy seizures, therewas very little chance that any drug at all would work for me. It was then that my epilepsy specialist suggested that surgery might be the only way to control my seizures. I did not really take the suggestion all that seriously. At the time I knew absolutely nothing about brain surgery. The whole concept conjured up images in my mind of compulsory treatment for the criminally insane, rather than a means of controlling symptoms like seizures. But all this was to change. At my first appointment, the specialist had said that he wanted to redo the EEG and scans that I had already had several times. He explained that improved technology meant that these tests could well spot things they had previouslymissed. This EEGwas different from the previous tests in just one way. I had described at my first appointment how many of my seizures seemed to occur as I was waking up or falling asleep; and so I had been told to try not to have any sleep the night before the test. After all the usual parts of the