Woman cured of type of epilepsy earns driver’s license
Published: October 11, 2004
A woman who had suffered from epilepsy since childhood has earned her driver’s license at the age of 45 after surgery cured her form of the disease.
Becky Willis passed her driving test Friday, a milestone for a woman who could not get behind the wheel of a car because her body would convulse in a seizure several times per month.
Until four years ago, Willis had more or less resigned herself to living with epilepsy and to taking medications that helped her manage the disease. Her regular seizures, brought on by stress, “built character,” she said.
But now Willis considers herself cured of the disease, thanks to a second opinion and an old surgical procedure that is gaining new favor as a way to treat people with a certain kind of epilepsy.
The type of epilepsy that surgery can fix is called mesial temporal lobe epilepsy. It affects the deep structures within the temporal lobe, the brain region above the ear that mostly is responsible for memory. Only about 10 percent of the 1.5 million people living with epilepsy have mesial temporal lobe epilepsy, including Willis, and are candidates for surgery.
Willis and her husband went to the Seizure Disorder Center at UCLA Medical Center in July 2000, where Dr. Itzhak Fried removed a piece of scar tissue, about 1-inch-by-1-inch, from the temporal lobe of her brain.
Willis stopped having seizures after that, but she stayed on her medications for another two years.
Learning to driving a car took a little more time. She passed her written driving exam and got a learner’s permit in 2002, and finally this year, after much practice with her husband, she decided she was ready to try for her license.
“It feels great to know the state of Oregon has confidence in me,” Willis said.
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