Margaret wasn’t asking for much. She wanted to drive a car and live on her own. She wanted to remember family vacations and conversations with her friends. She wanted control of her seizures and her short-term memory. She found it all at Harper University Hospital’s Comprehensive Epilepsy Program.

Margaret had her first seizure when she was 13 months old. She didn’t have another until she was 12, but when she did it changed her life.

She had temporal lobe epilepsy – the most common form of the disorder – with complex-partial and simple-partial seizures. Margaret describes them as “blackouts” that left her staring into space for a few seconds or a few minutes. Doctors prescribed antiepileptic drugs, but the seizures continued through high school and into college. At her best, she could go two weeks without a seizure. At her worst, she’d have as many as 20 seizures a day.

She studied accounting at Michigan State University, but double vision made reading difficult. It forced her to study with books on tape. Her friends eventually started to notice the seizures interfering with her short-term memory.

“People would tell me they knew something was wrong,” Margaret said. “My memory was getting bad. I’d have conversations with friends and not remember any of it later.”