About a year ago we found out my 13-year-old niece, Red, has epilepsy. It’s shocking and sad but the good news is that it is easily controlled with regular medication and she should be fine. We found out because she passed out at school — not for the first time — and test revealed that she’d actually had a seizure. Her type of epilepsy can cause dramatic seizures like this, but more often, causes “absence seizures” in which she kind of spaces out for a few minutes at a time, her eyes losing focus and her brain being unable to pick up new information. Needless to say, we suspect that such seizures have interfered with her school career in the past, and hope that she can catch up now.

A couple of months ago, her mother, my big sister, SocialButterfly, passed out at work. She went for the same round of tests as Red, and it turns out…has epilepsy. They’re still figuring out exactly how her brain is affected but it’s likely she has the same kind of seizures as Red, and now she’s on similar medication which should help control the seizures in the future.

But the real kicker is that SocialButterfly’s doctors think that she’s always had it, and it has gone undiagnosed for 38 years. That makes me so sad. She’s such a sweet person but never had much use for school. She had a lot of trouble in grade school, survived high school, and then managed to complete a college course that got her a job. But looking back it’s clear that her undiagnosed condition made a big difference to her academic life and I really get upset thinking about what might have been. If only she could have been on medication from an early age, she could have cured cancer. Or been a member of parliament. Or owned her own business.

That isn’t to say her life isn’t a success — she does have a good job that she likes (well, other than her annoying boss), a home and a car, food on the table, and two really awesome kids. It’s just sad that she had to live with this condition for so many years, affecting her daily life in many little ways, and she never complained or questioned. Sometimes modern medicine really lets you down.