Personal Stories: Jennifer

My name is Jennifer Lindley.

When I was 10 moths old I got meningitis. It was by luck that the doctor that I had knew what he was looking at, because he had lost someone else to it. As I was living in the south west of western Australia. They had to race me up to PMH.

I was very sick for 2 weeks. It was at the end of the two weeks that I had a seizure, but I had nothing else until I was 2 year's old.

The doctors had me on different pills until I was 10.

When I was ten years old (1984) I was put into Tegretol, and was on until 2011 but I had been tired on Epilm.

My mum knew about an operation to control the seizures, but as I was still very young and my Brain was still growing, mum did not want to touch it in case something went wrong. She decided to wait until I was 21 to let me know, and then I could make the decision for myself.

By this time I was getting married and settling in to a job, so I decided to have a look into the operation and find out my options. As it turned out, I had a scar on my brain about the size of a grain of rice. They had to get me in for a week to find where it was coming from.

It took them four times of testing to pin point exactly where it was coming from. In February the next year they did the operation of L anterior temporal- lodectomy.

At the end of the year I asked my doctor if I could think about having kids. I had my first child 9 months later and then my second one just under 2 years later.