"My First Time"
  by: OTownMyAntiDrug

It was the morning of November 30, 1998. Twenty-eight days past my fourteenth birthday. Getting ready for school, again. It was about 6:00 am, I had just poured myself a bowl of Special K and sat down to eat it. My dad was downstairs lifting his machinery up from the basement and mom was in the shower. All of a sudden there's a huge crash and mom hollers out to me. "Jennifer what happened? Is everything all right?" No reply. She had just thought that dad dropped one of his machines or something on the stairs to the basement and that's what the crash was, but there was no cursing so she figured that wasn't it. She hollers again. "Jennifer... JENNIFER!!" She mutters some choice words, throws on a bathrobe and runs out where I am lying on the floor, completely blue, twitching and foaming at the mouth. Mom's completely freaking out at this point yelling to dad. He runs up and calls 911, then our neighbor who *thank god* is our family doctor. At this point we've woken the entire street. I've awoken my sister who was 17 at the time and my brother who was only 2. My gram comes running down as well. My mom's trying to make sure I'm o.k. Doing CPR and all that stuff. Gen (family doctor) and the ambulance get here about the same time and I'm starting to come to. When I start to awaken from my unconsciousness, I completely freak out. I'm crying uncontrollably because I have no idea what just happened or why so many people are standing around. And to see the ambulance there just made me lose it. I finally settled down (just a small bit) and Nicholas, my brother says to my dad "Is she going to die?" He's so cute. We assured him everything was ok and that I'd be fine. I got into the ambulance and lost it again because my mom was not allowed to travel with me. All I wanted at that point was somebody strong to be with me. I had no idea where I even was or where I was going. When we got to the ER and things settled down a bit, it all came clear to me (with some help from the doctor, of course). He said I'd had a seizure but that'd I'd be fine. I just needed to stay in the hospital for a few days and have some tests run on me to find out why I had one to begin with.

To this day I have no idea why I have epilepsy. I only have them, on average 1-2 times a year, but it's still very odd. The blood tests showed that there was nothing in the cereal which I ate that morning which caused the onset of the seizure and it doesn't run in the family at all, on either side. The only link we can think of is that I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was about 8 or 9 years old. I was on Ritalin up to the day I had my first seizure. My neurologist in Boston told me that sometimes people with ADD or ADHD can be misdiagnosed. The symptoms of ADD/ADHD are similar to those of epilepsy and many times it just goes to being misdiagnosed. Unfortunately that happened in my case.

As of this moment, I am four months seizure free. I'm due for my driver's test in the next month or two. Wish me luck!! :)