Being a mother of a child who is intellectually impaired from Epilepsy you might think that my wish would be quite simple……a cure. While this is true, a cure is something I wish for more than anything else in the world. My main Christmas wish is made up of a few smaller wishes.

 

I wish that science could tell me how this happened to our little girl? It might not change anything at the moment, but for me it would bring closure.

 

I wish that the importance of finding out if there was water on Mars millions of years ago, was just as important to finding a cure to all of the debilitating neurological conditions that affect millions of people world wide.

 

I wish that the ignorance that surrounds epilepsy would disappear forever. There is nothing quite so heartbreaking as telling people that you child has epilepsy and seeing their reaction. You might as well have told them that you have just given them the Ebola virus and they have just hours to live.

 

I wish that I didn’t have to explain to everyone what epilepsy is and what it means for my daughter, nor trying to explain it to her little brother. And that brings me back to my first wish…..when he asks the question “How did her brain get broken” I could give him a real answer instead of “it just happened that way”. 

 

I wish I could watch our home movies and not feel like a failure because I didn’t realise straightaway what was wrong with our little girl. Sitting there watching them 7 years later, I can pick every single seizure. But mind you, when she was a baby, the health care nurse would tell me to be thankful I had a healthy child, when I asked her why my child wasn’t meeting her milestones. I think that’s called cold comfort, healthy child but intellectually impaired. 

 

I believe that part of what makes wishes come true is hard work. It’s a bit like becoming a millionaire. Unless you are extremely lucky and win lotto, most people don’t become millionaires overnight. It takes lots of hard work.

 

And for me, I guess that is why I talk regularly to people about epilepsy. For every person that I talk to, it is one more person who is aware of the condition and the impact that it has, thus reducing the ignorance. I like to think of it as you tell one person, they tell two more, then those two tell four more and so on. Soon Epilepsy will be as well known as say cancer. Then if you say to someone that you suffer from epilepsy, their question won’t be “so what’s that mean” they will be able to ask “what type do you have”.

 

I wish that the funds raised for research into causes of epilepsy were in the thousands rather than the hundreds, but getting some of  the big employers to support this cause is very hard. Maybe I should wish for a little genie to help in this area.

 

My Dad use to tell me when I was little, not to wish for anything that wouldn’t fit in Santa’s sack. I think it was his way of telling me that I wasn’t getting a horse or going riding in the high country for Christmas. Now I’m sure that these wishes aren’t as big as a horse, and some of them will fit into Santa’s sack, so lets hope that some of these wishes will soon become Santa’s presents.