Special to The Record
Whenever she feels like she is floating “in an aquarium,” Audrey Huard said she needs to stop what she is doing and find a safe place to lie down. It is a sensation she has felt since she was a child but it only recently took on the label of epilepsy.
“I was scared to have a seizure and for people to look at me like I was a monster,” she admitted. “It is extremely scary and it made me very anxious.”
Diagnosed at 28 years old, Huard admitted she had little to no knowledge of what epileptic seizures look like and went her entire teenage years thinking her attacks were merely waves of fatigue.
Part of this is because there exists a severe lack of understanding regarding epilepsy, with most people associating the neurological disorder with convulsions – but that is not always the case. For Huard, most of her seizures manifested themselves through the feeling of dissociating or losing focus.