I’m currently 18 years old and I am someone who suffers from epilepsy. I stopped having seizures and stopped taking medication for my epilepsy when I was about 6-7 years old so it hadn’t affected me that much through my life. Early last year I began having seizures again due to stress and constant exhaustion, so I was put on a very high dosage of medication to help stop or prevent me from having seizures. For a while they helped but then my seizures only got worse. Because of this I couldn’t: work, go out with friends and could barely go to college. It brought on a whole new level of stress and only made things worse. So the doctors put me on the highest dose of the medicine I could be on. This meant the side effects (such as: depression, anxiety, insomnia, daytime sleepiness, and common drowsiness) were happening and affecting me a lot more. At some point early this year I felt alone, scared and just worried about what the hell I was going to do with my life if things kept up the way they were with my condition. So as the situation kept worsening the idea of suicide felt normal to me at the time. One night I opened a packet of pills and spread them out on my desk, and I was going to take them all and with any hope I wouldn’t make it. But before I could do so I picked up my phone and called my friends and told them how much of a hard time I was having with it all and how I had felt like I finally reached my breaking point, and I told them about what I was going to do. They had convinced me not to do it and arranged to meet up and hangout for a few days, this helped me a lot because realized that I wasn’t alone, and I had these wonderful people willing to take time out of their days to help me out of a very dark place. Since then, I have felt a lot better, sometimes I get feelings of doubt and feel down about everything but I remember I have these loving people around me. I guess it’s very helpful and important to know that I’m not alone. No one is ever truly alone. You just need help for the right people. I hope everyone else who is going through something bad can read this and find hope and realise they are never alone. There’s always someone or something to find comfort in.
