Elisha Savoie
Elisha Savoie was diagnosed as having Epilepsy before she turned the age of two and has been on medication ever since. From the time she was a baby she had symptoms which her mother, Tania Peters, didn't recognize as being caused by illness. Tania said “I use to notice that she was scared , it looked like she was seeing things that made her scared. She would hold on really tight to me but I didn't realize she was sick.”
She has different kinds of seizures that affect personality, thought processing, including language and Speech. Her epilepsy causes within her brain a cluster of short seizures that start and stop suddenly. Sometimes she will take as many as 10 – 20 or more seizures, one right after another. Tania shared that Elisha has also experienced generalized seizures over the years, that have effected the whole of her brain and believes they have caused some damage.
Most recently, in 2002 Elisha went to Halifax to see if she could have surgery to remove the part of her brain where the seizure activity was happening but they dicovered her seizure activity was all over herbrain, not in one place. At that time they decided to try a Cyberonics Vagus Nerve Stimulation (V N S), which is a implant. It has not completely stopped her seizures but her mother feels it has helped her. Normally, when Elisha would experience a seizure, she would not be able to recognize people around her, loose bladder control, use expletives, run away and sometimes enter other's homes by mistake not realizing where she was.
The journey with epilepsy has been a difficult and lonely one for Elisha, often when she would take seizures around folks who didn't know her, they would just think she was acting strange and not realize she was experiencing an epileptic seizure. This often left her feeling confused and misunderstood.
Today, however, Elisha would describe her life as being much happier. She loves to sing at benefits, volunteers with Special Olympics and in her spare time likes to spend time with her boyfriend, Joey and with her other friends.
"All in all" says Elisha, "the future is looking pretty good."
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