The daily life of a Montrealer changed completely two years ago thanks to treatment with intracranial electrodes which allowed him to stop his epileptic seizures.
Luis Navarro, whose epilepsy began when he was 18, could suffer up to 25 seizures a day.
“My daily life is really fear, I went out, whether to go to work or to go to study, and I lived in fear, I didn’t know if one day I was going to find myself in the hospital leaving our home,” he told TVA Nouvelles.
Some of his attacks caused him to be absent, making him unable to hold a conversation.
“What panicked me the most was the uncertainty I had every day, I didn’t know what was going to happen in my daily life, and I didn’t know if I was going to return home in the evening” , he confided.
His seizures became more and more frequent and the convulsions more and more intense, the medications were not working. In addition, Mr. Navarro had lost his job in recent years, he went out very little and no longer did much physical activity.
The Neuro team (the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) took care of him and opted for the implantation of intracranial electrodes against epilepsy two years ago and since then, no more seizures.
“There are really many causes of epilepsy, sometimes you can be born with a malformation, like a fold of the brain that is formed differently and we don’t always know why, but it can appear later in life, like for Mr. Navarro, the seizures started around the age of 18,” explained Dr. Raluca Pana, neurologist and epileptologist at The Neuro.
In Canada, approximately 300,000 people suffer from epilepsy.
