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Tag Archive for: Epilepsy

I Had Just Started Living Again. Then I Lost the Use of My Arms.

Stacey Chillemi award-winning podcast host sharing the story of losing the use of her arms after a parking lot accident and what four and a half years of recovery taught her about resilience and boundaries

By Stacey Chillemi | Award-Winning Podcast Host | 20x Bestselling Author | Founder, Advisor Global Media

 

I had spent years rebuilding after epilepsy.

Seizure free at last. Speaking on stages across the country. Doing the work that filled me up more than anything else I had ever done — standing in rooms full of people and watching something shift in their faces when the right words landed.

I was finally living the life I had worked so hard to build.

Then I drove into a parking lot.

It was not a dramatic moment. It was not the kind of thing you see coming. The lot was poorly constructed — uneven, a bump where there should not have been one. My car went over it and in less than three seconds I went forward and backward. My head hit the steering wheel.

I drove home and told myself I was fine.

My arms disagreed.

 

The Slow Arrival of Something Serious

That evening they felt strange. Not painful yet — just different. The way a body sometimes sends a quiet signal before it starts to scream.

By the next morning they were swollen.

By the day after that the pain had arrived — in my thumbs first, then spreading up through my arms, into my shoulders, into my neck, into my back. A fire that grew worse every day instead of better.

I could not move my arms past my hips.

I could not hold a coffee cup.

I want you to stop on that sentence for a moment. Because I did not understand what it meant until I lived it. We do not think about our arms. We do not think about the hundred small things they do every single day — getting out of bed, getting dressed, lifting a glass of water, hugging the people we love. We do not think about them because they have always simply worked.

And then one day they do not.

I could not get out of bed without help because I could not use my arms to push myself up. I could not dress myself. I could not participate in family events the way I always had. The doctors were clear — not even half a pound.

I had been told I could not drive because of epilepsy.

Now I was being told I could not lift because of my arms.

The dreams I had worked so hard to rebuild were dissolving again.

 

What the Tests Did Not Show

I tried everything. Physical therapy. Massage therapy. Acupuncture. Every natural approach I could find. I improved less than five percent across all of it.

Eventually the full picture emerged. Neck damage. Nerve damage. One arm where the muscle had separated from the bone. The other arm tearing itself apart trying to compensate. Surgery revealed more damage than the tests had shown.

Four and a half years of recovery.

There were mornings I did not want to keep going. There were mornings when the combination of everything — the epilepsy, the arms, the years of pain stacking on each other — felt like too much for one person to carry. I kept asking myself when it was going to stop.

I did not always have an answer.

 

What the Pain Taught Me

But I pushed through anyway. With the same resilience that had carried me through epilepsy. Quieter now. More tired. But still present.

And in those four and a half years something happened that I did not expect.

I changed.

I had spent most of my life saying yes. A people pleaser in the most complete sense — someone who measured her worth by how useful she was to others and how little trouble she caused.

When you cannot hold a coffee cup you have to be ruthlessly clear about what you are going to do with the limited energy you have. You cannot afford to spend it on things and people that drain you. The body makes the decision your mind was too afraid to make.

I started saying no.

I created real boundaries. I chose the people around me based on a simple question — does this person give me strength or take it?

I stopped performing wellness I did not feel.

I chose silence when I had previously chosen explanation.

I built a life I could actually live in.

 

Where I Am Now

Today my arms are mobile again. Not at full strength — perhaps never at full strength. But moving. Working. Doing most of what I need them to do.

I cannot control what lies ahead. I learned that lesson so many times across so many different versions of loss that it has finally settled into something I actually believe rather than just say.

But I can control the present. I can control who I allow close to me. What I say yes to and what I say no to.

I used to think that helping yourself first was selfish.

I understand now that it is the only way to genuinely help anyone else.

The parking lot did not destroy me.

The four and a half years did not destroy me.

They finished something that epilepsy had started — the long slow process of teaching me what I am actually made of and what kind of life I actually want.

I had just started living again when my arms gave out.

And it took losing them to finally understand what living actually means.

 

If you are in a season right now where life has taken something from you that you worked hard to build — I want you to know this. The rebuilding is not just about getting back what you lost. Sometimes it is about discovering what you never had in the first place.

 

Read the complete From Seizures to Success series: staceychillemi.com/my-story

Book a free strategy call: calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link

 

Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.

Explore how we can work together: staceychillemi.com/work-with-me

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I Was Sixteen Years Old and Drowning in My Own Bathtub. My Father Saved My Life.

Stacey Chillemi award-winning podcast host sharing the story of nearly drowning in her bathtub at sixteen and how her father saved her life

By Stacey Chillemi | Award-Winning Podcast Host | 20x Bestselling Author | Founder, Advisor Global Media

There are moments in a life that divide everything into before and after.

I was sixteen years old.

The bathroom was quiet. The water was warm. It was one of those unremarkable weekday afternoons that exist only as background noise in most people’s memories.

I felt the aura.

Anyone who lives with epilepsy knows this feeling with a particular and terrible intimacy. It is a warning — a few seconds of knowing what is coming without being able to stop it.

I was in the bathtub.

I remember the water. I remember the moment I felt my body stop cooperating — that specific helplessness that is unique to a seizure, when every instruction you send your muscles simply disappears somewhere between your brain and your body.

And then I went under.

The Sound in the Hallway

I do not remember what happened next. What I know I have pieced together from what my father told me. From the door he found locked. From the sound that stopped him in the hallway.

A gurgling sound.

My father was walking past the bathroom when he heard it. He called my name. I did not answer. He called again. Silence.

He kicked the door open.

He found me underneath the water.

He pulled me out.

What No One Talks About

I came back to consciousness on the bathroom floor with my father’s hands on my shoulders and a look on his face that I have never forgotten — the look of a parent who has just witnessed something no parent should ever have to witness and who is holding himself together by sheer force of will because falling apart is not an option when your child needs you to be present.

I was alive.

And I was embarrassed.

I was sixteen years old, and I had just nearly drowned in my own bathtub, and the first feeling I remember after the fear was a profound and consuming humiliation — the particular shame of a teenager whose body had once again betrayed her in the most private and vulnerable of spaces.

That is the part nobody talks about when they discuss epilepsy. Not the seizures themselves. Not even the danger. But the indignity. The loss of privacy.

I wanted to disappear.

What My Father Did Next

My father did not lecture me. He did not make me feel worse.

He sat down on the bathroom floor beside me and said nothing for a long time.

He simply stayed.

That is what I remember most. Not the seizure. Not the water. Not even the fear.

His presence.

The specific grace of a father who understood that in that moment what his daughter needed was not words but simply another human being willing to sit on a bathroom floor and refuse to leave.

Sent Back

I was sent back that day.

I do not say that lightly. I say it because I believe it — because I have spent decades living in the aftermath of that afternoon, building something from the life that was handed back to me.

The 1.3 million people I reach through my podcast.

The twenty books.

The Congress testimony.

The thousands of people who have written to tell me that something I created found them in their darkest moment and felt less alone because of it.

None of it exists if my father does not hear that sound in the hallway.

None of it exists if he hesitates.

None of it exists if I stay under the water.

What I Know Now

I was sixteen years old, and I was drowning in my own bathtub.

And the world was not ready for me to leave yet.

Death sent me back.

What I have done with the life I was given back is the only answer I know how to give to the question of why I survived.

I tell the truth about what it cost.

I sit on the floor with other people in their own versions of that bathroom.

And I refuse to leave.

If you have someone in your life who has ever stayed when you needed it most — tell them today. Those people are rarer than we remember to say.

Read the complete From Seizures to Success series: staceychillemi.com/my-story

Book a free strategy call: calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link

Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.

Explore how we can work together: staceychillemi.com/work-with-me

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For Fifteen Years I Could Not Drive. Nobody Could See the Prison I Was Living In.

Stacey Chillemi award-winning podcast host sharing the story of fifteen years without driving and the prison nobody could see

By Stacey Chillemi | Award-Winning Podcast Host | 20x Bestselling Author | Founder, Advisor Global Media

 

I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was going into my third year of college. I was dating the man who would become my husband — Michael, who I had met in English class. We were driving back to his house through a quiet stretch of farmland, everything open and spacious the way the world feels when you are young and in love and do not yet know what is coming.

I felt the aura.

That tingling sensation. That specific feeling of funniness that was my body’s only warning. I turned to Michael in the passenger seat and said it clearly.

Michael. I am going to have a seizure.

I started pulling to the side of the road.

The clock ran out before I got there.

My body stiffened. My foot pressed down on the gas pedal. My arms locked to the wheel. Michael grabbed it — his foot all the way down on the brake, my foot all the way down on the gas — the car heading straight toward a telephone pole.

With everything he had he pulled us away from it.

He told me later that I had the strength of a male bouncer in that moment. That if he had not been in the car with me I would likely have been dead.

Death flashed before my eyes again. And I was not even conscious to see it.

 

What I Hoped Would Be Temporary

Shortly after that afternoon, I made an appointment with my doctor. He asked me to stop driving until my seizures could be fully controlled.

I thought it would be a few months. Maybe a year.

It was fifteen years.

 

Fifteen years of trying new medications. Of being weaned off one and started on another. Of my father driving up to my college campus to get me. Of the close friend who lived off campus who took me to the grocery store and anywhere else I needed to go. Of family members rearranging their schedules. Of accepting help I did not want to need from people I did not want to burden.

I was an independent woman. I had always been. I wanted to do everything on my own. I wanted to learn from my mistakes and grow. I wanted to reach the highest levels of success without asking anyone to carry any part of my weight.

And here I was — needing a ride to buy milk.

 

The Dream I Could Not Chase

Working in the city was manageable at first — trains and buses made it possible. But when the seizures intensified and I stopped working in the city, when I married Michael and built a life around what was available to me, the walls started to close in.

I felt like my dreams had been smashed.

I had wanted to be a news reporter. A journalist. Someone in television. I had dreamed of growing into something extraordinary in the media industry. But you cannot chase those dreams from the passenger seat of someone else’s car.

I settled. Because I had no choice.

And then we had children.

That was when the walls became a prison.

I could not take my kids to the toy store on an impulse. I could not pick them up from school without coordination. I could not do the small spontaneous things other mothers did without thinking. I felt depressed. I felt like an underachieved woman with everything on hold because of a condition I had never asked for and could not control.

I felt helpless.

 

What I Built Instead

But I did not stop.

I started writing.

When my seizures were at their worst, and the world outside felt inaccessible, I turned inward and poured everything onto the page. I wrote an article about epilepsy and sent it to the Epilepsy Foundation. They published it. Three to four hundred letters came back from strangers across the United States and Canada.

I took those letters and wrote Epilepsy You Are Not Alone.

I built a blog. A writing career. A platform. People came to me. I found that writing was not just my output — it was my therapy.

And then one day an email arrived.

Someone had found my book at a Barnes and Noble. They wanted me to know it had saved their life.

In that moment something shifted in me. Quietly and permanently. Maybe this life — the one I had built inside the walls of my limitations — was not the lesser version of the life I had planned.

Maybe it was exactly what I was supposed to build.

 

The Day the Prison Doors Opened

It took fifteen years. It took changing everything.

I changed how I handled stress. I changed what I ate. I incorporated integrative medicine — detox protocols, supplements, exercise, yoga. I rebuilt my sleep. I went to therapy. I worked on my confidence. I learned to accept that epilepsy was part of my life — and that acceptance was not defeat. It was the beginning of every real change I would ever make.

With my doctor — a true epilepsy specialist who refused to give up — we finally found the right combination. My seizures rapidly decreased.

And then they stopped.

When I finally got my license back after fifteen years, it felt like walking out of a prison through garden doors into open air with no one stopping me and the whole world ahead.

The first thing I did was take my kids to the toy store.

Just because I could.

 

What the Prison Taught Me

I used to think about what might have been. The news career. The journalism. The television industry. All the versions of myself that I would never get to be.

I understand now that everything I built inside those limitations was not the consolation prize.

The book that saved a life was built inside those walls.

The blog that became a platform was built inside those walls.

The platform that became a podcast reaching 1.3 million listeners worldwide was built inside those walls.

The twenty books. The Congress testimony. All of it — built from inside a prison nobody else could see.

 

The prison taught me that when the life you planned becomes unavailable, you do not stop building.

You build differently.

You work with what you have.

And sometimes — not always, but sometimes — what you build inside the walls is more extraordinary than anything you could have built outside them.

 

Read the complete From Seizures to Success series: staceychillemi.com/my-story

Book a free strategy call: calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link

 

Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.

Explore how we can work together: staceychillemi.com/work-with-me

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What Epilepsy Taught Me About Living in the Present Moment

Stacey Chillemi award-winning podcast host sharing what nearly fifty years with epilepsy taught her about living in the present moment

By Stacey Chillemi | Award-Winning Podcast Host | 20x Bestselling Author | Founder, Advisor Global Media

 

I developed epilepsy at the age of five.

It started as an ear infection — something so ordinary my mother almost did not worry about it. Ten days of penicillin. Some rest. That was supposed to be the whole story.

Instead the bacteria traveled to my brain and turned into encephalitis. I went into a coma. The doctors told my parents that if I survived I would likely have severe brain damage and might never walk again.

I survived. But epilepsy stayed.

I am fifty-four years old now — which means epilepsy and I have been acquainted for nearly fifty years. But it was not fifty years of suffering. It was something more complicated than that. There were years of active seizures that turned my life upside down — and there were years of hard-won peace, of seizure-free mornings, of a nervous system that slowly learned what calm felt like.

This is the story of what the hard years taught me — and how I finally found my way to the present moment and decided to stay there.

 

During the years of active epilepsy my life felt like a roller coaster I had not chosen and could not get off. One minute I was fine. The next minute I was on the floor. My doctors asked me to stop driving. I spent fifteen years unable to leave my own home without depending on someone else to take me. I was stepped over during a seizure at work — conscious, frozen, unable to move or speak — and fired thirty minutes later. I knocked on my new neighbor’s door not realizing I was covered in blood from a fall on the sidewalk, my children watching with fear in their eyes that broke my heart completely.

The roller coaster never gave me much warning before the next drop.

 

For a long time I fought it by living everywhere except the present moment.

I spent years looking backward at everything epilepsy had taken from me. I spent years looking forward in fear. What if the seizures came back. What if the medication stopped working. What if I could never be the woman I wanted to be.

What if. What if. What if.

And all that looking backward and forward left me completely absent from the only moment I actually had.

Right now.

 

The shift did not happen dramatically. There was no single morning I woke up enlightened. It was quieter than that. More gradual. More earned.

I stopped the pity party.

That is the most honest way I can say it. I stopped sitting in the grief of what epilepsy had taken and started asking what it had given me instead. Because it had given me things — things I would never have found on an easier road. Wisdom that only comes from surviving something you did not choose. Resilience built not in a gym or a seminar but in a hospital room and on an office floor and on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan where I stood with nothing and made myself a promise.

 

I learned to accept myself.

Not the version of myself I imagined I would be without epilepsy. This Stacey. The real one. The one who has been through it and is still here.

I learned to love her.

 

The past is the past. I cannot go back and change a single moment of it. Not the coma. Not the encephalitis. Not the office floor. Not the fifteen years. It happened. It shaped me. And it is done.

And the future — the future I cannot control either. I can worry about it endlessly. Or I can be here.

 

I take the wisdom the past gave me — the resilience, the perspective, the hard-won understanding of what actually matters — and I bring it with me into the present. Not the pain. Not the fear. Just the lessons.

And then I stay here.

I work on myself each day. I take care of my nervous system, my body, my spirit. I wake up and I do not ask what if — I ask what now. What can I build today. What can I give today. Who can I reach today.

 

Today — seizure free and stronger than I have ever been — I host a podcast reaching 1.3 million listeners worldwide. I have written twenty bestselling books. I stood before Congress and testified about disability rights and helped change the law. I sat on the floor with my children after a seizure and drew stick figures to explain epilepsy — not from a place of shame but from a place of complete presence.

 

None of it came from looking backward.

None of it came from worrying about what was ahead.

It came from staying exactly here.

 

Epilepsy taught me that the present moment is not a consolation prize for people who could not have the life they planned. It is the whole thing. It is everything. It is the only place where anything real ever actually happens.

I have a disorder. I accept that completely.

I love who I am. I accept that too.

And right now — in this present moment — I have the ability to become and do whatever I set my mind to.

Not despite epilepsy.

Because of everything it taught me.

 

You don’t get to choose your cards.

You only get to choose what you build with them.

 

Read more of my story: staceychillemi.com/my-story

Book a free strategy call: calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link

 

Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.

Explore how we can work together: staceychillemi.com/work-with-me

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I Knocked on My New Neighbor’s Door Not Realizing I Was Covered in Blood

Stacey Chillemi award-winning podcast host and bestselling author sharing the story of epilepsy motherhood and the night she sat on the floor drawing stick figures with her children

By Stacey Chillemi | Award-Winning Podcast Host | 20x Bestselling Author | Founder, Advisor Global Media

 

We had just moved into a brand new neighborhood.

My husband and I had worked hard for this — saved carefully, planned patiently, dreamed of a backyard where our children could run freely instead of a patch of grass in front of someone else’s building. We had a son named Michael and I had just given birth to our daughter Alexis. This was the house we had been building toward.

I did not know a single person on the street yet.

That afternoon I took the children and the dog out for a walk. The sun was out. The neighborhood was quiet. Michael walked beside me and Alexis was in the stroller. We were exactly where we were supposed to be.

And then I felt it.

The aura.

That particular feeling that people with epilepsy know with a dread that is impossible to describe to anyone who has not experienced it. A warning that arrives seconds before the body stops cooperating. Enough time to know what is coming. Not enough time to stop it.

I fell to the ground on the sidewalk.

The back of my head hit the pavement. I did not know it at the time but a small cut opened and began bleeding. Head wounds bleed profusely — something I would only understand later. In the moments after a seizure, the world comes back slowly. I was confused. I could feel something warm but I did not connect it to blood. I saw specks on my arm and could not quite understand what they were.

Slowly I came back to myself.

In a few minutes I would be fine. I knew that. I had been here before.

But my children were standing on that sidewalk. And I was their mother.

 

The Door I Did Not Know I Should Not Knock On

I made a decision that made complete sense to me in that moment.

I knocked on my new neighbor’s door.

I thought I was being responsible. I introduced myself calmly. Explained I had epilepsy, had just had a seizure, and would she mind if I sat down for just a few minutes.

Her mouth dropped open.

I could not understand why — until I followed her eyes.

I was covered in blood.

Not a little. Not a trickle. The kind of bleeding that looks alarming to anyone who does not know that head wounds look far worse than they are. I had blood on my face, on my arms, on my clothes. I had knocked on a stranger’s door in a brand new neighborhood and introduced myself — not realizing I looked like something from a scene no one would ever forget.

My husband rushed home. I was taken to the hospital. They put a staple in my head, and the bleeding stopped immediately. By the time we arrived, I already felt fine.

 

What I Saw in My Children’s Eyes

It was not the seizure that stayed with me.

It was the look in my children’s eyes.

Michael and Alexis standing on that sidewalk. Watching their mother on the ground. Not understanding what was happening. Not knowing if she was going to be okay. Carrying something in their small faces that no child should have to carry — the particular fear that comes from watching a parent be vulnerable in a way they cannot explain or fix.

That look broke my heart in a way nothing else had.

I had survived a coma. I had lost my independence for years. I had been stepped over and fired and rebuilt myself from nothing. None of those things had broken me the way that look did.

Because those things had happened to me.

This was happening in front of my children.

 

The Floor and the Stick Figures

That night I sat on the floor with Michael and Alexis.

I could not control my epilepsy. I could not promise them it would never happen again. There was so much I could not give them.

But I could give them understanding. And I could give them courage.

So I drew stick figures.

I drew Mommy having an aura. I showed them what my eyes look like when a seizure is coming. I walked them through every stage of what happens — what it looks like, why it is not as scary as it seems, how the body resets itself, how I always come back. I showed them how to call 911. I told them they would be so brave for knowing what to do.

And I watched something shift in their faces.

The panic left. The helplessness left.

Understanding had replaced it.

 

What I Did Not Know That Night

I did not know, sitting on that floor with my stick figures and my two children, that I was writing a book.

I thought I was just being a mother. Taking something frightening and making it smaller. Something my children could hold in their hands instead of carry silently in their hearts.

Years later, those stick figures became My Daddy Has Epilepsy, and My Mommy Has Epilepsy — published children’s books sitting in clinics and libraries and living rooms where other parents with epilepsy were trying to have the same conversation I had that night on the floor.

 

What My Children Actually Saw

I used to worry about what my children had seen over the years.

The seizures. The fear. The limitations. The worry in their eyes when I was quiet. My daughter Alexis rushing to my side any time I seemed lost in thought — Mommy are you OK are you OK — even when there was nothing to worry about.

I understand now that what they also saw — what perhaps they saw most clearly — was something different.

They saw a woman who fell and got up.

They saw a woman who sat on the floor and drew pictures instead of giving up.

They saw that it is possible to build a life that is full and meaningful and loving even inside circumstances you never chose.

I could not have taught them that in a classroom.

The sidewalk taught it. The floor taught it. The stick figures taught it.

And I am grateful — in the complicated hard-won way you can only be grateful for something that cost you something real — that they were there to learn it.

If you are a parent navigating a chronic illness or a challenge your children have witnessed — I want you to know this. You do not have to be perfect to be their greatest teacher. Sometimes the fall itself is the lesson. And what you do next is everything.

 

If you are a parent navigating a chronic illness or a challenge your children have witnessed — I want you to know this. You do not have to be perfect to be their greatest teacher. Sometimes the fall itself is the lesson. And what you do next is everything.

 

Read more of my story: staceychillemi.com/stacey-story-purpose-in-life

Book a free strategy call: calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link

 

Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.

Explore how we can work together: staceychillemi.com/work-with-me

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The Sidewalk Promise — I Was Stepped Over During a Seizure. Thirty Minutes Later I Was Released. Then I Testified Before Congress.

Stacey Chillemi award-winning podcast host who testified before Congress after being stepped over during a seizure and released from her job thirty minutes later

By Stacey Chillemi | Award-Winning Podcast Host | 20x Bestselling Author | Founder, Advisor Global Media™

I want to tell you about a sidewalk.

Not a famous one. Not one anyone would have reason to remember except me. Just an ordinary stretch of pavement outside a building in Midtown Manhattan — the kind you walk past a hundred times without noticing.

I noticed it.

Because the day I stood on that sidewalk with nothing — no job, no dignity, no roadmap for what came next — was the day I made myself a promise that changed the rest of my life.

This is the story I have never fully told.

The Day It Happened

I had lived with epilepsy since the age of five. If you want to read the full story of how it began you can find it in Part 1 of my series From Seizures to Success right here on this website.

What I want to tell you about today happened years later.

I was working in New York City for one of the most recognized names in television. The kind of job that felt like proof — proof that epilepsy had not won, that the years of seizures and lost licenses and quiet daily struggle had not defined the ceiling of what I could build.

Every morning I walked through those doors I felt something I had spent years chasing.

Normal. Capable. Seen.

And then one ordinary afternoon — without warning — my body did what it sometimes did.

I collapsed on the office floor.

I want to be very clear about what that looked like — because the detail matters.

I was conscious. Fully aware of everything around me. But frozen — completely unable to move, unable to speak, unable to do anything except lie there on that floor while life continued around me.

And in that state of complete helplessness a colleague walked past. Looked down at me. Stepped over my body like I was an obstacle in the aisle. And kept walking.

Thirty minutes later I was released from my position.

I walked out of that building and stood on the sidewalk outside.

What That Sequence Cost Me

I want to be honest about what that experience did to me.

I saw everything.

I saw the colleague look down at me. I saw the moment he registered what he was looking at. And I saw him make his decision — to keep walking — while I lay there on that floor completely unable to say a single word.

That is the part that hollowed me out most. Not the seizure itself. But being fully present — fully aware — while someone chose to step over me as though I were not a person worth stopping for.

And then thirty minutes later the door closed behind me.

That sequence — seen, stepped over, released — all within the same afternoon — is something I have spent years finding the right words to describe.

Thirty minutes is enough time to understand exactly what is happening.

Thirty minutes is enough time to feel the door closing before it closes.

And there was nothing I could do — lying there on that floor, unable to speak — to stop any of it.

The Sidewalk

I walked out of that building and stood on the sidewalk outside.

I do not know exactly how long I stood there. The city kept moving around me the way cities do — completely unaware that something had just shifted in one woman standing still on an ordinary piece of pavement.

And somewhere in that stillness something formed in the deepest part of who I was.

I am going to make a difference in this world.

Not out of anger — though the anger was real. Not to prove something to the person who had stepped over me. But out of the sudden and unshakeable understanding that what had just happened to me was happening to people everywhere. People who were losing jobs and opportunities and their sense of worth not because of anything they had done wrong — but because of a medical condition they had never chosen and could not control.

Someone needed to say something about that.

I decided it would be me.

Washington D.C.

The Epilepsy Foundation heard my story and asked me to come to Washington D.C.

So I went.

I stood in a room I had never imagined standing in — and I told the truth about what it feels like to live with epilepsy in a world that does not always make room for it. I described lying on that office floor — conscious, frozen, unable to move or speak — watching a colleague step over me and keep walking. I told them about the thirty minutes. I told them what that sequence of events costs a person. What it takes from them in dignity, in opportunity, in the quiet daily courage it takes to keep showing up after something like that.

In the front row sat Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey.

I watched him take out a handkerchief and wipe the tears from his eyes.

When it was over he came to find me. He shook my hand and told me that his own sister had lived with epilepsy. That what I had said that day mattered.

Not long after that testimony stronger protections became law — so that no one could be pushed out of a job simply for having a disability.

What One Voice Can Do

I have thought about that sidewalk many times over the years. About how close I came to just going home and staying quiet. About how the easiest thing would have been to let the thirty minutes be the end of the story.

And I think about what would not exist today if I had done that.

The podcast reaching 1.3 million listeners. The twenty bestselling books. The thousands of people who have written to tell me that something I created found them in a dark moment and helped them through it.

All of it traces back to a sidewalk.

And a promise nobody witnessed.

One voice — telling one true story, in the right room, at the right moment — can reach all the way from a sidewalk in Manhattan to the floor of Congress.

Not a perfect voice. Not a polished voice. Just an honest one.

That is all it took. And that is all it ever takes.

What This Means for You

Whatever floor you have been left on.

Whatever thirty minutes changed everything for you.

Whatever sidewalk you are standing on right now.

The people who stepped over you have absolutely no idea what they are setting in motion. They do not know that their indifference is going to light something inside you that burns for decades. They do not know that the floor they left you on is going to become the foundation of something they could never have imagined.

Make the promise.

Keep it.

The world is waiting for what comes next.

Read the complete From Seizures to Success series: Part 1 — The Teardrop That Saved My Life Part 2 — The Colleague Who Stepped Over Me Part 3 — The Shoebox Full of Letters Part 4 — How Nature Healed What Medicine Couldn’t Part 5 — Why I Built a Platform for 1.3 Million People

If this story resonated with you I would love to help you share yours. Every expert, coach, author and entrepreneur has a message the world needs to hear — and I have spent thirty years helping people find the platform to share it.

Book a Free Strategy Call at calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link and let us talk about what is possible for you.

Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media™. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.

Explore how we can work together: staceychillemi.com/work-with-me

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How Nature Healed What Medicine Couldn’t — And What It Taught Me About Listening to Your Body

Stacey Chillemi award-winning podcast host sharing her natural healing journey after fifteen years of epilepsy

From Seizures to Success: How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher — Part 4 of 5

By Stacey Chillemi | Award-Winning Podcast Host | 20x Bestselling Author | Founder, Advisor Global Media™

New to this series? Start at the beginning: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi

I want to be careful about how I tell this part of my story.

Because it would be easy to frame it as a dramatic turning away from conventional medicine — a moment where I threw away my prescriptions, embraced ancient wisdom, and was miraculously healed overnight. That would make a satisfying story. But it would not be the true one.

What actually happened was quieter than that. More collaborative. More honest. And ultimately far more powerful than any dramatic gesture could have been.

What happened was that I started listening.

Fifteen Years

I want you to sit with that number for a moment.

Fifteen years.

That is how long I lived with active seizures after my initial diagnosis at age five. Fifteen years of trying medication after medication. Fifteen years of side effects that sometimes felt as debilitating as the condition itself. Fifteen years of adjusting and readjusting and hoping that this new combination, this new dosage, this new specialist would finally be the one that gave me my life back.

The medications helped. They gave me enough stability to go to college, to build a career, to create something resembling a normal life within the constraints epilepsy imposed.

But they never fully solved the problem.

And after fifteen years I had to ask myself an honest question I had been afraid to ask before.

What else might be possible that I have not tried yet?

The Conversation That Changed Everything

That question led me to a conversation with a herbalist — someone who had spent decades studying the relationship between the body and the natural world.

I want to be completely clear about what happened next.

I did not abandon my medical team. I did not stop my medications overnight. I did not decide that conventional medicine had failed me and that nature alone would save me.

What I did was add.

I added knowledge. I added research. I added a deep and curious investigation into everything I had not yet considered — the herbs, the vitamins, the minerals, the foods, the lifestyle practices that generations before us had relied on long before pharmaceutical solutions existed.

I became a student of my own body in a way I had never been before. And I did all of it in full partnership with my doctors, never replacing their guidance but building intentionally on top of it.

Two Years of Research

What followed were two of the most intensive years of my life.

I read everything I could find on the relationship between nutrition and neurological health. I studied which herbs had been used historically to support the nervous system. I looked at the evidence around vitamins and minerals the body needs to function at its best.

I looked at stress. At sleep. At the way chronic illness creates a cycle of anxiety that keeps the nervous system locked in survival mode — and at what it genuinely takes to interrupt that cycle.

And then slowly, carefully, always in conversation with my medical team — I began implementing what I was learning.

What Slowly Changed

This did not happen overnight.

There was no single morning when I woke up healed. No dramatic before and after.

What there was — was a slow, almost imperceptible easing.

A seizure that was less severe than the last one. A week that went by without an episode. Then two weeks. Then a month. A gradual recalibration of a nervous system that had been in survival mode for so long it had forgotten what safety felt like.

And then one day — after fifteen years of living with epilepsy as a constant companion — I realized the seizures had stopped.

Completely.

The Day I Got My License Back

Getting my driver’s license back after fifteen years was something I still find difficult to put fully into words.

Because it was not just a license.

It was proof.

Proof that the body has a capacity for healing we do not always give it credit for. Proof that asking what else might be possible — and doing the painstaking work of finding out — can change everything.

I sat in my car that first day for a long time before I drove anywhere. Just sat with it.

The Book That Came Next

Two years of intensive research had filled pages and pages of notes. A deep and hard-won understanding of how herbs, vitamins, minerals, foods, and lifestyle practices work together to support the body’s natural intelligence.

And I knew — with the same certainty I had felt years earlier when I put four hundred letters in a shoebox — that this knowledge needed to be shared.

So I wrote The Complete Herbal Guide: A Natural Approach to Healing the Body.

Not as a prescription. Not as a promise that what worked for me would work for everyone. But as a resource — a practical, accessible guide for anyone who had ever asked the same question I had asked.

What else might be possible?

What I Want You to Take From This

If you are navigating a chronic condition — whether it is epilepsy or something else entirely — I am not here to tell you what your path looks like. I do not know your body, your history, or what your medical team has advised.

What I do know is this.

Your body is not your enemy.

The symptoms that feel like betrayal are often the body’s most honest attempt to communicate something it does not know how to say any other way.

And the question worth asking — always, at every stage of your journey — is not just how do I make this stop. But what is my body trying to tell me, and am I actually listening?

That question changed my life.

It might change yours too.

To learn more about the natural health research I compiled during those two years visit thecompleteherbalguide.com — the platform I built to make natural health guidance accessible to everyone.

 

This is Part 4 of a 5-part series: From Seizures to Success — How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher.

Part 1: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi

Part 2: staceychillemi.com/colleague-stepped-over-me-epilepsy-workplace-stacey-chillemi

Part 3: staceychillemi.com/shoebox-full-of-letters-epilepsy-book-stacey-chillemi

Part 5: Why I Built a Platform for 1.3 Million People — coming next

 

If this story resonated with you I would love to help you share yours. Book a Free Strategy Call at calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link and let us talk about what is possible for you.

 

Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.

Explore how we can work together: staceychillemi.com/work-with-me

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The Shoebox Full of Letters — And the Email That Changed Everything

Stacey Chillemi award-winning podcast host and bestselling author sharing the story behind her epilepsy book

From Seizures to Success: How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher — Part 3 of 5

By Stacey Chillemi | Award-Winning Podcast Host | 20x Bestselling Author | Founder, Advisor Global Media™

New to this series? Start here: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi

I want to tell you about a shoebox.

Not a special one. Not carefully labeled or neatly organized. Just an ordinary shoebox — the kind you slide under a bed without thinking twice. But inside that box was something that quietly changed the direction of my entire life. Three hundred letters. Maybe four hundred. From strangers across the United States and Canada who had read my words and felt, for perhaps the first time, that someone finally understood what they were carrying.

That shoebox is where my life’s work truly began.

The College Student Who Wrote to Washington

I was in college when I did something that required more courage than I gave myself credit for at the time.

I was struggling. Not just with the pressures of studying and grades but with ongoing seizures triggered by late nights and stress and a body that refused to cooperate with my ambitions. There were no online communities back then. No podcasts. No spaces where people talked openly about what it really felt like to live with a chronic condition. There was silence.

And in that silence, I sat down and wrote a letter to the Epilepsy Foundation in Washington D.C.

I did not write to ask for help. I wrote to ask a question — the same one I had been quietly asking myself for years without finding a satisfying answer.

How do other people cope with this? How do they get through the hard days? What do they do when the fear becomes too much and the world keeps moving without them?

I asked the Foundation to publish my article. In it I invited anyone living with epilepsy to write to me and share their stories — not the clinical version, but the real human version of what it meant to live with this condition every single day.

What Came Back

The letters arrived.

Three hundred of them. Four hundred. From people I had never met — sitting in their own living rooms and hospital waiting areas and college dorms — carrying the same invisible weight I had been carrying, waiting for someone to ask the very question I had asked.

I read every single one. I wept over some. Laughed at others. Recognized myself in almost all of them. And slowly, letter by letter, something shifted inside me that I can only describe as the feeling of no longer being entirely alone in the world.

I put all those letters in a shoebox.

And I made myself a promise.

One day I am going to write a book.

Why That Promise Was Harder Than It Sounds

The resources available to someone living with epilepsy back then were painfully limited. The books that existed were written by doctors in clinical language that went completely over the head of anyone who had not spent years in medical school. Nobody was writing the book that a frightened person needed to find at two in the morning.

So I decided I would.

Not because I had credentials after my name. But because I had three hundred letters in a shoebox that proved I was not the only one asking these questions.

The Man Who Refused to Let Me Make Excuses

Life moved forward the way it does. Jobs in New York City. The beautiful ordinary chaos of building a life. And eventually marriage to the man I had fallen in love with in my very first English class in college — the one who had known me through every version of myself.

One evening he looked at me with the particular expression of a man who has completely run out of patience for someone he loves deeply.

And he said something I have never forgotten.

Would you finish that book already.

I laughed out loud.

And then I sat down and finished it.

The Email That Proved Everything

Epilepsy: You Are Not Alone hit the bestseller list and stayed there for thirty years. I revised it again and again as the community evolved and as new generations needed to find themselves in its pages.

But the moment that mattered most came years later, in the early days of email — when receiving a message from a stranger still felt remarkable.

I opened my inbox one morning and found three sentences that I have carried with me every day since.

A stranger had found my book at a Barnes and Noble. They had been browsing the shelves the way people do when they are not really looking for a book — when they are looking for something harder to name. They pulled my book from the shelf. They read it. And then they wrote to tell me what happened next.

I was on the verge of suicide. Your book saved my life. Thank you.

What Three Sentences Taught Me About Purpose

I have thought about that email thousands of times. I have thought about all the moments between my letter to the Epilepsy Foundation and that email — all the doubt and the delay and the years of starting and stopping — and how any one of those moments could have been the moment I gave up.

And I have come to understand something I now believe with absolute certainty.

Your message does not need to be perfect to be life-changing. It just needs to be true.

The book that saved that person’s life was not written by a doctor. It was written by a young woman who had been through something hard and had the audacity to believe her experience was worth sharing.

That is all it took.

What the Shoebox Taught Me About Business and Life

You are never as alone as you feel in your worst moments.

And neither are the people you are meant to serve.

This is the truth that drives everything I do through Advisor Global Media. Every expert, coach, author, and entrepreneur I work with has their own version of a shoebox — a story, a hard-won piece of wisdom, an experience that shaped them in ways they have not yet fully shared with the world.

And somewhere out there is a person whose life depends on hearing exactly that.

Your message matters. Not because it is perfect. Because it is yours.

 

This is Part 3 of a 5-part series: From Seizures to Success — How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher.

Part 1: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi

Part 2: staceychillemi.com/colleague-stepped-over-me-epilepsy-workplace-stacey-chillemi

Part 4: How Nature Healed What Medicine Couldn’t — coming next

Part 5: Why I Built a Platform for 1.3 Million People

 

If this story resonated with you I would love to help you share yours. Book a Free Strategy Call at calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link and let us talk about what is possible for you.

 

Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.

Explore how we can work together: staceychillemi.com/work-with-me

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The Colleague Who Stepped Over Me — And What It Quietly Started

Stacey Chillemi award-winning podcast host sharing her story of workplace adversity and resilience

From Seizures to Success: How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher — Part 2 of 5

By Stacey Chillemi | Award-Winning Podcast Host | 20x Bestselling Author | Founder, Advisor Global Media™

If you are just joining this series — welcome. Part 1 tells the story of the coma I survived at age five and the epilepsy diagnosis that followed. You can read it here: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi

There is a moment I have carried with me for decades. Not because it was the worst thing that ever happened to me — though it ranks among them — but because of what it set in motion. What it forced me to become. What it ultimately proved about the relationship between our lowest moments and our greatest purpose.

I was at work. A job I had fought hard to earn at a prominent corporation. And then one ordinary afternoon, without warning, my body did what it sometimes does.

I collapsed on the office floor in a full grand mal seizure.

When I came back to consciousness, I was still on the floor.

A colleague walked past. Looked down at me. Stepped over my body like I was an obstacle in the aisle. And kept walking.

Thirty minutes later I was called into an office and let go.

What That Silence Did to Me

I have thought about that colleague many times over the years. Not with bitterness — though there was plenty of that in the beginning — but with a kind of quiet, searching disbelief. What does it take for a person to look at another human being in their most vulnerable moment and choose to keep walking?

I do not have a satisfying answer to that question.

What I do have is a very clear memory of what it felt like to be on the receiving end of that choice.

It hollowed me out.

Not just losing the job — though that was devastating in its own right. It was the silence. The deliberate, chosen silence of someone who saw me and decided I was not worth stopping for. In that silence I heard every fear I had ever quietly carried about myself confirmed out loud.

You do not belong here. You are a burden. You are invisible.

I want to be honest about what that did to me, because I think honesty is the only thing that makes a story like this worth telling. For a while, I believed those things. Not all at once and not consciously — but somewhere underneath the surface of my daily life, that moment had planted something dark that took years to fully uproot.

The Decision Nobody Witnessed

I went home that day with nothing. No job. No dignity. No roadmap for what came next.

And I sat in the quiet of my house, and I made a decision that nobody witnessed, that I did not announce to anyone, and that I could not have fully articulated at the time.

Nobody will ever make me feel invisible again.

Not because I was consumed by anger — though the anger was real. Not because I wanted revenge. But because I understood, in a way I had never understood before, that the people who have been made to feel most invisible are often the ones with the most important things to say.

I had things to say.

What I Built From That Floor

I started writing. Not with a plan or a platform or any idea it would lead anywhere meaningful. I wrote because writing was the one space where epilepsy had no jurisdiction — the one place where no one could step over me or decide my experience was not worth their time.

And I sent those words out into the world.

What came back changed my life. Thousands of letters and messages from people who recognized themselves in my story. People who had felt the same invisible. People who had asked themselves the same desperate question in the middle of their own dark nights.

One letter stopped me completely. A stranger wrote to tell me that my book had saved their life. That they had been at the very edge. That something in my words had reached them in that darkness and pulled them back.

I read that letter many times. And each time I thought about the colleague who had stepped over me. And I understood — finally and completely — that the worst professional moment of my life had not been sent to break me.

It had been sent to build me into someone whose story could save lives.

What the People Who Step Over You Do Not Know

The people who dismiss you — who overlook you, who step over you without a second thought — have absolutely no idea what they are setting in motion.

They do not know that their indifference is going to light something inside you that burns for decades. They do not know that the moment they make you feel invisible is quite possibly the precise moment you begin becoming impossible to ignore.

Today my podcast reaches 1.3 million listeners. I have written twenty bestselling books. I have appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. I have stood before Congress. I have won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host. I have built Advisor Global Media — a company devoted entirely to helping experts, coaches, authors, and entrepreneurs share their stories with the world.

None of that happens without the floor.

All of it happens because of it.

For the Professional Reading This on Their Own Floor

The people who made you feel small do not get to write your ending.

The wound they gave you — as unfair and undeserved as it was — may be the very thing that connects you most powerfully to the people you are meant to reach. Because the world does not need more voices that have never struggled. It needs voices that have been through something real, that can look at someone in the dark and say — with the full authority of lived experience — I have been there. And there is a way through.

That is your purpose. That is your power.

And nobody — nobody — can step over that.

 

This is Part 2 of a 5-part series: From Seizures to Success — How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher.

Part 1: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi

Part 3: The Shoebox Full of Letters — coming next on the website

Part 4: How Nature Healed What Medicine Couldn’t

Part 5: Why I Built a Platform for 1.3 Million People

 

If this story resonated with you, I would love to help you share yours. Book a Free Strategy Call at calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link and let us talk about what is possible for you.

 

Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.

Explore how we can work together: staceychillemi.com/work-with-me
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The Teardrop That Saved My Life

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Stacey Chillemi award-winning podcast host sharing her epilepsy survival story

I went home that day with nothing — no job, no dignity, no roadmap for what came next. But somewhere in the quiet of that afternoon I made a decision that would take years to fully understand.

I started writing.

I wrote about what it felt like to live inside a body that frightened people. About the loneliness of chronic illness. About the quiet courage it takes to keep showing up when the world keeps making it clear that your showing up is inconvenient.

And I sent those words out into the world.

What came back changed my life. Thousands of letters from people who recognized themselves in my story. People who had felt the same invisible. People who had asked themselves the same desperate question in their own dark hours.

One letter stopped me completely. A stranger wrote to tell me that my book had saved their life. That they had been on the edge. That something in my words had reached them in that darkness and pulled them back.

I sat with that letter for a long time. And I understood — finally — that everything I had been through was not sent to break me.

It was sent to build me into someone whose story could save lives.

The Natural Healing Discovery

After fifteen years of searching — of medications and side effects and the slow erosion of hope — I discovered something extraordinary. Natural remedies. Herbal medicine. Ancient wisdom about the body’s capacity to heal itself that modern medicine had largely overlooked.

I threw myself into two years of intensive research. And slowly — so slowly it felt almost impossible — my seizures began to diminish.

After fifteen years, they stopped completely.

I got my driver’s license back.

What I Built From Everything I Survived

Today my podcast reaches 1.3 million listeners across more than 100 countries. I have written twenty bestselling books. I have appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. I have stood before Congress to advocate for people with epilepsy. I have won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host. I have built Advisor Global Media™ — a company devoted entirely to helping experts, coaches, authors, and entrepreneurs share their stories with the world.

None of it happened despite my epilepsy.

All of it happened because of it.

Your Story Is Not Over

Whatever you are carrying right now — whatever feels too permanent, too unfair, too large to survive — I want you to hear something from someone who has been exactly where you are.

Your story is not finished.

The thing that is trying to break you may be quietly building you for something you cannot yet see. The wound may become the wisdom. The struggle may become the strength. The thing that tried to silence you may become, if you let it, the very source of your most powerful voice.

That is what epilepsy taught me. And it is why I have never stopped telling the truth about it.

This is Part 1 of a 5-part series: From Seizures to Success — How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher.

Continue reading: Part 2 — The Colleague Who Stepped Over Me; Part 3 — The Shoebox Full of Letters; Part 4 — How Nature Healed What Medicine Couldn’t; Part 5 — Why I Built a Platform for 1.3 Million People

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