Me, Myself and Life With PNES

  Fun Facts to help start your week: Word of the Week:   Cartoon Word Origins:  The word cartoon comes via French for carton and from Italian cartone, which meant literally ‘strong heavy paper, pasteboard’ (it was a derivative of carta ‘paper,’ which came from Latin charta, source also of English card, carton, chart and charter). Its meaning was in due course transferred to the preliminary sketches made by artists on such paper, the original and for nearly two centuries the only sense of the word in English.  Its application to comic drawings in newspapers and magazines began in the 1840s. Source: Dictionary of Word Origins by John Ayto Remember to try this week to be like cartoons, strong and sturdy, but don’t forget to have some fun too and let your inner child come out to play.   Poem of the Week:   They asked her, “What is real happiness?” She answered, “Happiness is not fulfilling every pleasure or getting every outcome you desire.  Happiness is ...

 Hi and welcome to my first blog post.  I am not even sure where to start, but here goes nothing.  Four years ago, in June 2021, I experienced my first seizure and while we (my family and I) didn’t know at the time what was going on, it wasn’t too long after that first episode that I was diagnosed with Pyschogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures or PNES for short.  Now, before we get too far into the rest of my journey early on, I would like to explain what PNES is and how it is different than any type of Epileptic Seizure.  So, as you may have guessed, PNES episodes are non-epileptic in nature, but that doesn’t mean they don’t look like or feel like epileptic seizures, especially to the person going through the non-epileptic seizure episode.  Now, you may be thinking, what does she mean by they’re similar to epileptic seizures, but yet very different, well let me explain what a non-epileptic seizure episode looks like, from someone who’s had and still has them. ...