November is Epilepsy Awareness month and TJ will again promote awareness for the disorder.
Artwork by Mia Nogueira
The TJ Special Education Department will be joining forces once again with the Epilepsy Foundation and JROTC to promote awareness for the disorder through their Epilepsy Awareness Month campaign.
Special Education Para-Professional Sean Currey is organizing various events to promote epilepsy awareness. Currey, who has lived with epilepsy himself for 20 years, feels passionately about educating others about the disorder and wants to do so with the TJ Community and dispel certain myths about epilepsy.
Epilepsy is a neurological disorder caused by abnormal electrical activity in the brain, resulting in different sorts of temporary seizures. According to studies, epilepsy affects more than 2 million Americans, and about 150,000 new cases are discovered each year. “Epilepsy is a disorder, not a disease, but anyone can get it. It can be a traumatizing head injury, a tumor, or even an infection, like meningitis, that causes the disorder to evolve,” said Currey. Surprisingly, about 70 percent of all cases diagnosed have no known cause. “I’ve lived with epilepsy for 20 years, and I still don’t know what caused it,” said Currey.
Epilepsy is a widely misunderstood disorder. “Most people think of those convulsive, shocking seizures when they think of epilepsy, but there’s many kinds of seizures,” said Currey. Seizures may include muscle spasms, mental confusion, a loss of consciousness and uncontrolled or aimless body movements. Generalized seizures include “grand-mal” seizures, losing consciousness, the stiffening of the body and the jerking of limbs, are the results of a discharge of neurons throughout the brain. Partial seizures can be uncontrolled body movements, confusion, or the loss of awareness, and are caused by a discharge of neurons in just one part of the brain. One in ten adults will have a seizure sometime during their life.
During the month of November, JROTC and the Special Education Department will be organizing and hosting different events promoting Epilepsy Awareness Month. “The Unified Sports class will be making posters to put around the hallways. We will be having ‘Purple Day’ again, since purple is the official color of epilepsy. We’re having a speaker from the Epilepsy Foundation. We will be handing out brochures and bracelets,” said Currey. Purple Day will be held on November 22, the same day as the speaker from the Epilepsy Foundation speaker, Marcee Peterson, will come visit TJ.
One special activity that the department is most enthusiastic about is the clothing drive for the Epilepsy Foundation. People with severe cases of epilepsy are often found helpless with financial problems due to the high cost of epilepsy treatments. “When you have several seizures during a day, it’s hard to maintain a normal job, and with the cost of treatment, people who have severe cases of epilepsy have a hard time coming up with money for clothes,” said Currey. Medications for epilepsy alone can cost as much as, if not more, as $1000 a month, and treatments, such as regular EEG and MRI tests, cost about the same. Many people living with epilepsy are not insurable due to the cost of treatments. “Clothing drives help in a simple way that it alleviates that extra cost for those families,” said Currey. The clothing drive sponsored by the Epilepsy Foundation will begin soon and the official start date will be announced on the Spartan Edition. In the meantime, anyone can drop off their donations to any of the Special Education rooms.
Through the Epilepsy Awareness campaign, the Special Education Department also wants to inform students about how to react when someone is having a seizure. According to Currey, there are enough students who suffer from epilepsy and seizure disorders at TJ where information on the disorder will be beneficiary to the student body. Some key things to remember are: stay calm, don’t hold the person down to try to stop his or her movements, put something flat and soft under the head, and gently turn the person onto his or her side. Do not try to force the mouth open, because a person having a seizure cannot swallow his or her tongue; efforts to hold the tongue down can injure the teeth or jaw. Remember to stay with the person until the seizure ends, and be as friendly and reassuring as possible once the person comes to consciousness. For more information on epilepsy, visit the Epilepsy Foundation Website.
