It wasn’t until after she’d become a mother that Jenny Hunt realized she had epilepsy.
She’d experienced feelings of déjà vu and heavy sinking sensations in her stomach all her life — symptoms she chalked up to anxiety and kept to herself. Then, six weeks after she had her second daughter, she woke up on her bathroom floor surrounded by EMTs. She’d had her first tonic-clonic seizure.
“That’s not an uncommon story — people can have strange episodes that last less than a minute, some of them feeling like panic attacks,” says UNC Health neurologist Atif Sheikh, MD. “It can be very difficult to recognize, but it’s epileptic activity.”
Hunt was prescribed medication to help manage the seizures, but she continued to have partial seizures. She tried to stay positive, but it was a challenge. Her seizures meant Hunt couldn’t drive, and the medications she took had side effects of depression. “I was trapped,” says Hunt. “I felt I had to get a better answer.”
And she did. Working with the team at UNC’s Epilepsy Monitoring Unit (EMU), including many overnight stays in the EMU for testing, she learned her seizures were coming from a specific part of her brain that never fully formed, which meant surgery was an option.
“The whole EMU staff is a dream team,” Hunt says.
After additional testing, she chose to have surgery to remove a small, abnormal piece of tissue on her hippocampus. And she says she’d do it all again.
“The old Jenny came back to life,” Hunt says. “I could find joy in things again.”
