Monica Agudelo still remembers the first time she got a seizure. She was sitting in her parents bedroom, talking to her mother.
I started feeling something something was coming, something was going to happen, said Agudelo, 32. Then, I just blanked out. She kept talking to me, and she was like, Why are you not answering?
Agudelo was 17. For the next 15 years she would struggled with Left Temporal Lobe epilepsy that caused an average of 20-second-long seizures. During that time, she would blank out, close and open her hands, and sometimes make a monotonous mmm sound.
It happened everywhere school, the grocery store, work.
It was actually embarrassing when people would see you like that, she said.
One year ago, it stopped.
Cleveland Clinic surgeons performed a left temporal lobectomy. They made a-four inch, C-shaped cut in her temple just above her ear and removed her left temporal lobe, where abnormal electrical charges in the brains cells were causing the seizures. The surgery was done at the hospitals Cleveland, Ohio, campus after neurologists and epileptologists at the Weston center did a pre-surgical evaluation and post-surgery follow-up.
Agudelo, who lives in West Miami-Dade, is now seizure free.
In recent years, treatments for epilepsy, a condition that affects 1 percent of those living in the United States, have been advancing. There are new medications, along with the discovery that surgery should be used to treat epilepsy much sooner in a patients treatment.
Before, doctors would prescribe medications in different combinations, and if these failed, other medications would be prescribed. That process could go on for decades before doctors resorted to surgery. Now, if the first two- to three medications fail, surgery can be the next option. The rate of seizure-free patients after surgery is 50 to 90 percent.
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Surgery can help those with epilepsy