“A bright flash of lightning / Streaks through the sky / And the loud rumble of thunder / Is very close by.”
The words are from a poem written by Greg Van De Moortele called The Storm. It’s a simile for the electrical storms that bombard his brain, and it won a contest by the Epilepsy Foundation of America in 2006, just two months after Van De Moortele had part of his brain removed.
The Bridgewater man says he lived the life of any regular kid until he woke up one Saturday morning with a terrible headache. The then nine-year-old asked his brother to get him a cold face cloth. By the time his brother returned, Van De Moortele was having a grand mal seizure.
“I woke up in the hospital. I didn’t know where I was and I still had a bad headache,” he recalled Saturday.
