Device helps Paradise woman deal with seizures
Posted:
03/09/2012 11:39:43 PM PST
Click photo to enlarge
Tina Lewis
An epileptic Paradise woman has found a way to control
her seizures and she wants to get the word out.
After a snowmobile accident in Butte
Meadows in 2002, Tina Lewis, 45, began suffering epileptic seizures - sometimes
up to 20 uncontrolled seizures a day -- not to mention splitting headaches. She
was taking numerous prescribed medications - at one point, 16 different pills
four times a day. All the medications weren't to control her seizures, some were
to counter the side effects of other medications.
Over the course of two years since the
accident, her weight dropped to about 98 pounds and she was confined to a
wheelchair. The several medications also affected her coherency and her speech.
She said she spent a good two years in her bedroom because she was basically
immobilized. Her eyesight was also affected. After a visit to her eye doctor,
she was told her eyes weren't the problem, it was her medication.
Lewis finally took to the Internet to look
for help.
"I was sick of being sick," she said.
That's when she came across Vagus Nerve
Stimulation Therapy. Made by Cyberonics, Lewis describes it as a sort of
"pacemaker for the brain."
"I spent days on the Internet
researching," she said. "Research, research, research. I wanted to know
everything about it."
She found out the VNS is not only FDA
approved but is covered by most insurance plans. The VNS device was finally
implanted on September 2006.
"Yeah, I was nervous, I was going to get
my throat cut open," she said.
She was weaned off her medication and an
electronic box was implanted near her left shoulder. A wire runs from the
device, up her neck and into her brain.
"Seizures are about a misfire in your
brain," she said.
From the box, electric pulses are sent to
her brain to keep her stable. It was an outpatient process and she was finished
with the operation and released within hours. Now when she begins to feel a
seizure coming on, she runs a provided magnet over the box, which either stops
or greatly reduces the severity of the seizure.
And it works, she said.
"Instead of 10 to 20 seizures a day
uncontrolled with medication, I have two or three a month, with no medication
and no wheelchair," she said.
Lewis always keeps her little black magnet
with her in case she senses a seizure about to occur. She also keeps several
black magnets stashed at various places around her house. And she never goes
anywhere alone. There are side effects, she said. She goes hoarse when the box
sends its electric pulse to the brain.
"You can feel it in your throat," she
said.
There is also the sensation of minor
electrocution, but she can live with it, she said.
"I'll take the side effects over the
splitting headaches and the alternative," she said.
Now Lewis wants others to know about VNS
therapy and she hopes her story will help stop the stigma of seizure disorders.
"Seizure disorders are hard to prove," she
said.
She said a lot of people think seizures
are drug and alcohol related fits, or a psychological disorder. Since the
implant, her quality of life has shown clear improvement.
"I have more independence, no in-home care
and no more meds," Lewis said. "I can think straight, I'm not cloudy like I was
when I was on medication."
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