Bree’s Story

Epilepsy decided to makes its appearance when I was about 17/18 years old, after I’d never had any neurological issues or really any health problems my entire life. They have no clue what started my seizures and no one else in my family has epilepsy, so it was kind of a shock, to say the least, to randomly be literally disabled by something that never even crossed my path beforehand.

I’m one of the “lucky” patients to be diagnosed with multiple types of epilepsy and at least 7 seizure types currently – the seizures keep changing and adding new types, so who knows what my final count will be one day!  Unfortunately, one of the types of epilepsy I have happens to be intractable or drug resistant epilepsy, which has been the most dibiltating for me, and that type has also brought me to at least 3 brain surgeries so far. 

Going from healthy to needing brain surgery in about 10 years was one of the most difficult and surprising things anyone could throw in my lap. While going through the brain surgery process, it truly hit me how difficult, serious and awful this diagnosis was for me to experience and how much I was just kinda sweeping things under the rug and “dealing with this” as my life.

In order to make the final step to getting the RNS (Neuropace – Responsive Neurostimulator) implanted in my brain, I needed to be in a better mental space, or they wouldn’t operate. As much as I didn’t want to at the time, I was thankfully pressured into making a social media account to talk about my life with epilepsy to try to get me in this better headspace. 

I fought my neuropsychiatrist and mother about making my SoCal.Epilepsy account for months, thinking it wouldn’t do anything for me and now I’m lucky enough to be in contact with literally thousands of people that deal with this epilepsy life all over the world. It truly did help me more than I’d ever think it would in many ways. I’ve made some of my closest friends from making my account and get to learn so much about epilepsy every single day from thousands of perspectives. 

Epilepsy definitely thwarted my plans on what I wanted to do for a career and a lot of my life, in general, but I’ve decided to take on epilepsy awareness instead. I’ve made it a personal mission to not let people feel alone and lost like I did during the first 10+ years of having epilepsy and try to help them realize it’s okay to laugh when you want to and you can, because we don’t get too many laughable moments in our diagnosis. 


Kind words you would like to share with a parent or someone newly diagnosed:
I’ve learned so much more from our own community then anything in the world…please, please make connections, whether in person or social media,  within the community, because no one understands epilepsy better than someone who has it in their own life every single day. 

Connect with Bree:
Email: Contact.socalepilepsy@gmail.com
Instagram: @socal.epilepsy @whatsshakinpodcast