Title: Sailing Through the Storms of Seizures: Living with epilepsy, recovering from brain surgery, and being a caregiver
Author: Jon Sadler
Publisher: XlibrisUS
ISBN: 978-1-9845-3111-7
Pages: 219
Genre: Medical / Health Risk Assessment
Reviewed by: Allison Walker

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If you have allergies, you take an antihistamine and feel better. If you have a headache, you take a painkiller and feel better. Imagine being sick, but no medication can help you. You keep taking your pills, but to no effect. Then imagine this disease you have is epilepsy. Author Jon Sadler has lived with intractable seizures most of his life, seizures which do not respond reliably to medication. Seizures have nearly drowned him, run his car off the road, sent him home from work, and put him in the hospital. In his novel, Sailing Through the Storms of Seizures, Sadler recounts his struggle to come to terms with his disease, and learn how to live with increasingly uncontrollable and debilitating seizures.

If knowledge is power, then Jon Sadler has made himself powerful in the struggle to control his seizures. Part of managing your seizures is learning where they come from, and what causes them. Yet, the brain is an incredibly complex organ, so much so that after centuries of study, scientists are really only just touching the surface of how our brains work. Sadler does his best to simplify the brain’s complex function, in order to describe the way a seizure is effected by, and in turn affects the brain. Seizures begin in one area of the brain, and can spread from there depending on the type, Sadler explains. When one neuron in the brain becomes overloaded, he continues, it can pass that on to the surrounding neurons. “This is known as an electrical storm,” he writes.

Devoted to sailing, Sadler is a competitive sailor in school, and continues for many years as a hobbyist. Despite his parents’ concerns about his solo adventures, sailing becomes the one constant pastime which Sadler won’t give up. Then the inevitable happens, Sadler has a seizure and almost drowns while sailing by himself. By the time he pulls himself out of the water and navigates to the beach, he is exhausted and unable to move from the sand he falls upon. “With sailing and with seizures, I cannot always be in a safe place when the storms occur,” Sadler writes. Despite his near death experience, Sadler does not give up sailing. In sailing and in seizures, sometimes you just have to pick yourself up, put your sails back together, and carry on.

Trying to survive his brain’s electrical storms, Sadler recounts learning to manage his triggers, and some of the events which made him more disposed to experiencing a seizure. Sadler’s honest and heartfelt retelling of the storms he weathered speak of a fierce determination to do good by himself, his family, his community, and his God. As much a resource for others suffering from chronic illness, as a memoir of his own trials, Sailing Through the Storms of Seizures is an inspiration. Sadler doesn’t just talk about the good fight, he fights it every day.