I Had To Spend Six Months In Hospital After Pouring A Chip Pan Of Boiling Oil Over Myself. Why? I’m An Epileptic

From one day to the next, Stephen Kennedy began to suffer from debilitating epileptic seizures.

Now 49, Stephen, from Leeds, needs 24-hour care, and suffers from memory loss.

When Stephen first found out he was epileptic, doctors sent him for all kinds of scans.

They discovered that he had temporal lobe epilepsy in his left side.

Doctors suggested he travel to London to have brain surgery.

But when he woke up, Stephen was told that temporal lobe epilepsy had been discovered in both sides of his brain, making him ineligible for the surgery.

“I woke up the next morning and a nurse came running over,” says Stephen.

“The nurse said: ‘We took you down for surgery, we put you to sleep, and it turns out it was both temporal lobes of your brain. So if we'd chopped one out, you'd have been left disabled and brain dead’.

“So they've had to leave them with epilepsy in both temporal lobes in my head and it's just got worse over time.”

Stephen was fitted with a VNS implant, which he describes as 'like a pacemaker but for your brain’.

A VNS is a treatment for epilepsy that involves a stimulator (or ‘pulse generator’) which is connected, inside the body, to the left vagus nerve in the neck.

The stimulator sends regular, mild electrical stimulations through this nerve to help calm down the irregular electrical brain activity that leads to seizures.

“I've got this VNS and if it wasn't for this, I'd be dead,” Stephen says.

“But even sometimes doctors in hospital haven’t heard of it. People need to be more aware.”

But despite the help that the VNS offers him, the epileptic seizures can strike at any time, meaning he lives on a knife edge of not knowing when they could next happen. The seizures have resulted in terrible accidents.

For example, Stephen spent six months in hospital after pouring a chip pan of boiling oil over himself while suffering from a seizure.

Stephen had to spend months avoiding sunlight while in the hospital, but he tries to see the positives, saying that despite the severity of the burns, his skin recovered fantastically.

“When they took the bandages off, they took quite a few pictures of my burns, but now you wouldn't even know that happened,” he explains.

“I've not got one mark on my body. I should be scarred for life after all this.

“I've got pictures to prove it, but if it wasn't for the photos, you wouldn't even know it happened.”

Another sad result of the epilepsy is that Stephen lost his life with his wife and four children when first diagnosed with epilepsy.

“At the time, my wife said ‘I don't want to see my kids seeing you have fits like that’ and she divorced me,” he explains.

But despite epilepsy having turned his life upside down, with the anti-seizure medication and seizures causing memory loss, Stephen looks for the positives in his life.

“Honestly, my memory's terrible,” Stephen says.

“I can’t remember what’s happened yesterday or last week.

“But my long-term memory is brilliant: I can put music on from decades ago and sing every single word.

“I'm glad I've got my music to keep me going.”

Stephen wants to raise awareness of epilepsy and remove some of the stigma around it.

“Epilepsy is a dirty word for some people,” Stephen says.

“People don't want to know. They think it's a dirty thing. But at the end of the day, I've done nothing wrong.

“I’m being tarnished with a brush and it's disgusting.

“People do need to know that epilepsy can happen suddenly, it's not your fault, and something has to be done about it.”

Find out more about Epilepsy Society, the UK’s only charity transforming the lives of people with epilepsy at Epilepsy Society | Transforming lives through advocacy, research and care