Battles of The Mind

Given an epilepsy diagnosis at age forty-nine, Linda's once solid life fell apart. Her seizures uncontrolled by medications and with no access to treatment, Linda had no choice but to seek help in another province. From 2016 to 2018, she travelled between BC and AB, spending up to four weeks in hospital apart from family and friends. But even under the care of a world-renowned epileptologist and his team of experts, her epilepsy evolved as fast as her life crumbled-a relationship breakup, job loss, and the death of her mother. Medications and brain surgeries could not stop the misfiring neurons and she became desperate. After a sixty-seven-day stretch in hospital starting in BC and ending in Calgary, and determined to control the battles within her brain, Linda sold her home, and moved to Calgary with her son, Devon.

Upon arriving, she found herself back in hospital. After three weeks under a microscope, she now has a secondary diagnosis of psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES). With access to therapy to treat her PNES, she can look forward. Will it improve her mental state and stop the non-epileptic seizures? Will the storms within dissolve? Will her wish for a life where the seizures are better controlled, and normalcy is returned come to being?

It was 2019 with a pandemic looming. Her wish for a happy ending-delayed. Linda's epilepsy is complicated; her doctors call her an enigma-a mystery.

Through her experiences and the lack of resources available in her home province, the need to relocate to Calgary had been traumatic. By sharing her story, Linda hopes to educate others about this disease and the demand for research and a cure. Her voice echoes the search for control in the hearts and minds of fellow sufferers worldwide and serves as a reminder to others they are not alone; the path is more crowded than we realize. Epilepsy: It was first documented around 2000 BC in forty medicine tablets within a Babylonian

textbook. It is one of the world's oldest documented neurological disorder. Over the centuries, people with epilepsy were outcasts and punished, burned, electrocuted, and

institutionalized. Many underwent surgical procedures-lobotomies-which reduced them to lifeless shells. Such barbaric treatments are in the past, replaced with gentler, more humane options as medicine advanced. Our treatment of sufferers may have improved, but a cure still escapes us.