| Editor's Desk by Robin Rowe
 Andrew Halsey is a 40-year-old Englishman with epilepsy who made history in 1997 when he rowed across the Atlantic Ocean alone. He was the first person with epilepsy (or any other disorder or disability) to ever do so.
Andrew's solo row of almost 3,000 miles took 117 days. It was a trip filled with storms, 30-foot waves, seasickness, and crisis after crisis. His boat capsized twice, a leak destroyed his food, he ran out of fresh drinking water, he lost his rudder and navigational equipment, and he had a significant seizure, among other problems. When he finally landed in St. Lucia he had lost 42 pounds and had had nothing to eat or drink for three days.
"It was an amazing experience that I would happily do again. I wanted to show that epilepsy need not ruin your life. If you believe in yourself you can still do what you want to do."
From childhood, Andrew Halsey had dreamed of making such a voyage. Then in 1982, as a young man in his twenties, he developed epilepsy. Eventually, he determined that he would not let his seizure disorder stand in the way of his lifelong ambition, and set out at age 40 on the journey of a lifetime.
Not many people are cut out to row across the Atlantic Ocean, but courage and achievement come in many different forms. In this issue of "Talking About Epilepsy...", we hear from two totally different but equally interesting voices. Lynn Tasker grapples with the problem of being a parent who has epilepsy in her charming vignette entitled "My children should know... but when?". And teenager Anneke Allan expresses her feelings about recently developing seizures in her arrestingly creative art piece, the "Locker". We hope you will enjoy sharing these two women's personal experiences as much as we did.
Many people with epilepsy struggle with serious problems. If you are a person who might have a seizure at any time or place, just walking out your front door may require consummate bravery. "Sometimes," Seneca said nearly two thousand years ago, "even to live is an act of courage."
Yet each of us is capable of being the best that we can be. We need heroes like Andrew Halsey to inspire us to live up to our full potential, by focusing on what we can do and not on what we can't. We also need safe places, like this newsletter, to tell our own stories-- tragedies and triumphs, both big and small, of living well (and sometimes not so well) with epilepsy.
This is your invitation to send us your epilepsy story, essay, monologue, poem or other literary piece and to start "Talking About Epilepsy..." All of us can only gain.
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