My little cousin has temporal lobe Epilepsy.She's photosensitive, so she wears prescription wrap-around sunglasses with a foam rubber seal around the edges. They keep light out of her eyes. She wears them almost everywhere but in the house.Almost every chain store has bright lights and reflective white floors which are triggers for her. SHE HAS BEEN TOLD BY NEUROLOGIST TO WEAR Those.
She lives in a small town in the south - east of Asaba in Delta State, Nigeria where everyone knows the other person. Regardless, she continually runs into problems such as:
- Having her glasses physically removed from her face and being told, "I don't trust people who wear sunglasses indoors."
"Hey! Don't take my glasses! I have epilepsy!"
"Oh, well, I didn't know that."
Okay. What?
Her pharmacist who has been filling her prescription for years did the Axl rose snake dance in front of her one day trying to see his eyes/ pupils behind his glasses.
"What incompetence!" she reported to me. "Like that wasn't enough, she said allowed these group of old ladies act like middle-schoolers pointing and laughing and loudly making fun of my "biker glasses". Suddenly looking like the Unabomber is funny? Yeah, I get it."
"She said when I thought things were getting better, that's when the worst happens."
She had these co-workers claim that my cousin doesn't have epilepsy and that she was faking it. Really? Because she loves crying and peeing herself in public? She loves falling over and writhing on the floor in her vomit? Wired.
My cousin has had people correct her and be like, "No you have narcolepsy, my friend has epilepsy, and she has none of these restrictions!" thereby implying my cousin was making things up.
"Oh so you are a neurologist?" she would ask, "Then you know there are a bunch of different types of epilepsy. Oh, so you didn't know that? Then shut up."
"The list goes on and on," she said. So, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
This doesn't even cover the terrible things that happened to her in school as a child. No one has to go through all that because of the unfortunate circumstances surrounding their birth. I will like to see some epilepsy awareness in Africa and Nigeria as a whole because no one knows what the hell this ancient disorder is.
Yours,
@faithfulfaith