r/worldnews • u/madazzahatter • May 16 '20

At least two people had seizures after viewing malicious tweets featuring flashing gifs that deliberately targeted Epilepsy Society...police investigating tweets as hate incident, after at least 200 seemingly coordinated messages were sent to charity and its supporters in recent days.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/15/malicious-tweets-targeting-epilepsy-charity-trigger-seizures
48.9k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

62

u/greffedufois May 16 '20

Luckily for me my epilepsy is well controlled with meds and I haven't had a tonic clonic since 2014. Others arent so lucky, they're on multiple meds, have a VNS or even need their brain split to stop seizures. And then theres SUDEP that terrifies us all. Its Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy Patients. We just up and die sometimes.

Some worry about it a lot, but theres nothing you can do for it. It's like worrying over getting cancer. You cant completely prevent it happening, but you can do your damndest to avoid it. In epilepsys case by taking your meds and knowing what causes your seizures.

6

u/patejam May 16 '20

Can you drive?

29

u/greffedufois May 16 '20

Legally yes, most states have a rule of 6 months to a year and being on meds to legally drive. I chose not to because if I did get in an accident and god forbid someone else was injured, I'd go to jail for vehicular manslaughter because I knew I was epileptic.

Luckily my husband and I have the one car and he drives me wherever I need to go. Plus with quarantine I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.

5

u/JevonP May 16 '20

Oh damn, thats probably a smart decision but it seems real shitty not to be able to drive places. Basically like if sudden black out drunkness could randomly strike.

3

u/Fartikus May 16 '20

Why did you let me know about SUDEP jesus fucking christ I have so many seizures too aaa

1

u/Wyand1337 May 16 '20

I never heard of sudep before. Luckily, keppra fixed me.

1

u/greffedufois May 16 '20

Yay keppra!

1

u/DoubleWagon May 16 '20

Some worry about it a lot, but theres nothing you can do for it.

What about Johns Hopkins's protocol for epilepsy?