Katelyn Winter is in the middle of a sentence about her grandpa – about how he, too, had epilepsy – when some unknown word starting with the letter “I” is cut off. There’s something firing off in her brain.
It’s small. Winter doesn’t lose consciousness or convulse this time. But, as her mother quickly explains, Winter, 22, has just had the latest in a life of almost daily seizures that started in 2008 – a life the family hopes will be greatly improved when a seizure response dog joins the family.
“See, she’s having one,” Joan Winter said. “OK, this was a short seizure you just witnessed. You see how she was trying to talk and it went …”
She stretches open her mouth as if her jaw has a different agenda than her mind.
“Now, she yawns,” Joan Winter said. Sitting across the table, Katelyn Winter yawns. “Now, she might not be able to talk.”
“OK, now I can’t talk right,” said Katelyn Winter, a graduate of Alden-Hebron High School. The thought about grandpa has escaped.
It’s a moment that has become too regular around the Winters’ Hebron household. Winter has a variety of seizures – grand mal, partial complex, clusters, throat seizures.
