Remembering

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

From Laurence Binyon's poem For the Fallen, written in September 1914

Today is Remembrance Sunday, a day for remembering the fallen soldiers who have fought for our country. I was planning on blogging about the bravery of our heroes and the current conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq but instead, I feel almost compelled to write about something a little more personal, about someone close to my heart. I want to write about the person I am remembering today. 

Me and Diane, aged 17.

You see, November is Epilepsy Awareness Month and like many people out there, my life has been touched by Epilepsy. When I was 11, I met Diane. We were in the same tutor group at High School and we quickly became best friends, remaining close throughout school. Diane had Epilepsy. She was diagnosed when she was 10. She had Grand Mal seizures but they were well controlled with Epilim (ironic, I know) and I never saw her have a seizure the entire time I knew her. When we were 16, we moved on to different colleges but we remained close, seeing each other as often as we could. It wasn't until I went to University that we started to drift apart, seeing each other less and less as we moved onto different circles of friends and our separate lives became busier and busier.

One day in August, four years ago, I received a knock on my front door. It was a mutual friend of ours from High School. She was visibly shaken. She told me she'd heard that Diane was in ICU, was in a coma, hooked up to a ventilator and her family would be turning off the machines that were keeping her alive later that day. She'd had a seizure and never come round. We would never see Diane alive again.

By this time, I had already begun my own journey with seizures and hadn't discovered that I had NEAD. I was still under the impression that I, myself had Epilepsy and was keeping it to myself, hadn't even spoken to my family about it yet. What had happened to Diane scared me. Until now, I didn't know that it was possible to die from a seizure. I didn't know that people could seize and not wake up. Diane's death was a real wake up call for me when it came to seizure safety and I made it my priority to educate myself about first aid for seizures and to ensure that I didn't put myself in any risky situations.

But her death was also a wake up call in terms of life. Diane was the same age as me when she died and she will never get any older. She should be turning 27 in January, instead I have to remember her the way she was in photographs. She will never get to live out her fantasy of working with animals, she'll never get to marry the man of her dreams or start a family. That's all in the past for Diane. And that saddens me so much.

So, please please everyone out there reading this make it your task this month for Epilepsy Awareness Month to educate yourself what to do if someone you love (or even someone you've never met) has a seizure. Because it really could mean the difference between life and death.