Valley residents affected by epilepsy share stories

AUSTINTOWN — Patricia Davis, 59, was a schoolteacher. Thomas Capp, 50, worked in construction and is a machinist. Sparkle Sanders, 27, is a single mother with a 4-year-old son.

What they have in common is epilepsy and the desire for people to better understand the disorder that dominates their lives.

They chose November, National Epilepsy Awareness Month, to gather at the Mahoning Valley Epilepsy Fund and tell their stories.

Davis was 21 and a student at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pa., when she had her first seizure.

“I had just finished an exam. I ran to my dorm and up three flights of stairs to my floor and bent over a water fountain to get a drink. That’s when I had my first seizure,” she said.

Capp was diagnosed at the age of 17 while attending Lordstown High School. His first episode occurred at home. He was examined by local physicians and at the Cleveland Clinic, but doctors could not find anything wrong, he said.

Sanders is not epileptic, but her son DaVail is. He began having seizures at 3 months and was diagnosed with epilepsy shortly thereafter. He has 15 to 25 seizures a day.

DaVail, enrolled in the special needs preschool at West Elementary in Youngstown, takes four medications daily. He has had four brain surgeries and a vagas nerve stimulation (VNS) implant.

The device sends electrical pulses through the vagas nerve in the side of the neck to the brain. It can reduce the number and intensity of seizures and reduce the number and amount of medications needed to control seizures.

Seizures that used to last 10 minutes now last just seconds, Sanders said.

She said epilepsy has slowed DaVail’s mental and physical development, and she does not know what the future holds for him.

While she said DaVail’s condition is nothing she would have wished for, she said some positive things have come from it.

Read the full story Monday in The Vindicator and on Vindy.com