For most of his life, Kevin Ramsey has lived with epileptic seizures that drugs cannot control.
At least once a month, he would collapse, unconscious and shaking violently, sometimes injuring himself. Nighttime seizures left him exhausted at dawn, his tongue a bloody mess. After episodes at work, he struggled to stay employed. Driving became too risky. At 28, he sold his truck and moved into his mother’s spare bedroom.
Cases of intractable epilepsy rarely have happy endings, but today Mr. Ramsey is seizure-free. A novel battery-powered device implanted in his skull, its wires threaded into his brain, tracks its electrical activity and quells impending seizures. At night, he holds a sort of wand to his head and downloads brain data from the device to a laptop for his doctors to review.
“I’m still having seizures on the inside, but my stimulator is stopping all of them,” said Mr. Ramsey, 36, whose hands shake because of one of the three anti-seizure drugs he still must take. “I can do things on my own I couldn’t do before. I can go to the store on my own, and get my groceries. Before, I wouldn’t have been able to drive.”
