Given my penchant for storytelling, we’re starting this month off with a story from last summer. I was working a shift at the Minnesota Epilepsy Foundation’s State Fair booth and they had a game of Plinko set up: drop a disk into a slot, watch it bounce off a bunch of posts on the way down until it eventually lands in one of four spots at the bottom. If you’ve ever seen The Price Is Right, you should know exactly what I’m talking about.
But in this case, people didn’t win any money. Each of those four spots indicated a question that we would ask the person (they were either multiple choice with three choices or true/false, so your odds of answering correctly were pretty decent whether you knew anything about epilepsy or not). The question that made me a little uncomfortable was talking about calling an ambulance if a person has a seizure that lasts for longer than four minutes. Why? Because it reinforces the idea some people might have that there’s only one type of seizure. It’s sometimes called a grand mal seizure, a generalized tonic-clonic seizure or the kind of seizure that makes you fall down, go boom and start knocking lamps off of tables.
I don’t know what they did this year, but I suggested that they change that particular question to a multiple choice question: How many different kinds of epileptic seizures are there?
A) 4
B) 10
C) More than 40
If you guessed C, you would have been right and won yourself a nifty new Minnesota Epilepsy Foundation pencil! I speak from personal experience when I say that there are a lot of different seizures that people with epilepsy can have. If this is new information for you, then as the month goes along, perhaps you’ll learn about a few more that don’t involve damaging lamps.
