Sara Staggs practiced civil rights litigation before she was forced to give up her career due to epilepsy. In 2017, she received life-changing surgery at the Cleveland Clinic.
November is National Epilepsy Awareness Month. Staggs appeared at Good Morning Cleveland-Sunday to talk about epilepsy and her work to end the stigma surrounding the brain disorder.
“I'm doing so much better. The brain surgery that I had at the Cleveland Clinic was a laser ablation,” Staggs said. “It's a relatively new surgery where they can just, instead of opening up your skull, taking out a larger part of your brain, they can find where the pacemaker is, and then they just take a laser, and they can just ablate that really small part. So, it has a lot of benefits in that it leaves cognitive function intact. It's quite, quite high tech.”
Sunday, Staggs was in Cleveland, participating in Cleveland Clinic's Lifestyle Intervention For Epilepsy Symposium.
Staggs said, “About 3.4 million people in the US have epilepsy. It's the fourth most common neurological condition in the U.S. One in 26 people in their lifetime will develop it. It's very, very common, and people don't talk about it a lot because I think there's still a big stigma around it that we're working on.”
In May, Staggs sat down with News 5 Anchor Katie Ussin to discuss her first novel, Uncontrollable, which is based on her battle with epilepsy. The story follows a woman whose life is derailed by something out of her control.
In that interview, she said, “There was no adult novel out there where the protagonist had epilepsy. So, I said, ‘I’m going to write it and let’s change the narrative.’”
Staggs said. “I want people to know that it’s OK to talk about epilepsy, and seizure isn’t a dirty word,” said Staggs.
On Good Morning Cleveland-Sunday, Staggs also discussed seizure first aid.
The Epilepsy Foundationprovides lots of information and resources.
