“I Had Seen So Many Doctors. What Was Going to Be Different?”
Tiffany Mueller used to call them her “gas station episodes.”
She’d stare at a common object and draw a blank. Holding a book,
she’d ask her mother or fiancé, “What is this called?
Is it a…” and every single time, she’d finish the sentence
with “gas station?”
“That was just the word that would always come to my mind, ‘gas
station,’” she said. “They’d look at me in total
terror.”
An otherwise healthy 25-year-old in her final year at California State
University, Fullerton, Tiffany consulted doctors who diagnosed her with
anxiety and depression. Her memory loss started to affect her final year
of college so severely that she considered dropping out. But she earned
her BA in business marketing, and in 2006, she married Ryan Mueller, a
reserve firefighter.
“One night I woke up to a room full of firefighters,” she said.
“The firefighters knew my husband and they all said, ‘Ryan,
what are you doing here?’ He said, ‘This is my house, and
my wife just had a seizure.’”
Tiffany’s immediate thought was, “I don’t have seizures.”
Tiffany was taken to the emergency room where she learned that her “gas
station episodes” had been focal seizures. She didn’t have
depression. She had epilepsy.
That night set her on a frustrating 11-year journey. She saw a half-dozen
neurologists who weren’t able to identify the problem. They prescribed
medication after medication, but nothing really helped.
“My gas station episodes continued and progressed to becoming complex
partial seizures,” she said. “I got to a point in my life
where I’d have one or two seizures a day – upward of 12 to
15.”
During these complex partial seizures, Tiffany would “go blank,”
shutting her eyes and smacking her lips. As a successful real estate agent,
the situation was becoming untenable.
“When I would meet with a client, I’d have to say, ‘I
am epileptic, and I have seizures. If I have one, just know I’ll
be back,” she said. “It was embarrassing, but what was I going
to do? I am very strong in my faith. I prayed about it daily.”
Tiffany had to stop driving, relying on paid drivers or rides from her
mom (and business partner), Stephanie. She restricted her diet based on
advice from physicians.
“I struggled for so long, thinking this was just how my life was
going to be,” she said.
One day in 2017, she received a call from a colleague who was selling a
neurologist’s home. The colleague connected the two, and Tiffany
decided to go see him. But her expectations were low.
“I had seen so many doctors, had so many tests done. What was going
to be different?”
David Millett, M.D., Ph.D., a board-certified neurologist specializing
in seizures, epilepsy and electroencephalography, consulted with Tiffany,
then studied her seizures and her MRI. He noticed something that no one
else did: given the location of her cavernoma, or an abnormal group of
blood vessels in her brain, all of her seizures were probably originating
from this single lesion. He recommended removing the cavernoma, and perhaps
the seizures would stop.
Dr. Millett, director of the Epilepsy Program at the Pickup Family Neurosciences
Institute at Hoag, conducted several more tests to confirm the location
of important language functions, and then introduced Tiffany and her family
to neurosurgeon Charles Liu, M.D.
Six weeks after her surgery, the seizures are gone. She said she is more
alert, and the “gas station episodes” are a thing of the past.
“My memory and naming ability are awesome now,” she said. “My
husband said from the moment I woke up from surgery, ‘The old Tiffany
is back.’ Dr. Millett and Dr. Liu are phenomenal. I am so I am so
grateful for the help they’ve given me.”
She’s not the only one.
“The day I came home from my procedure my 5-year-old son was driving
in the car with my mother-in-law and said, ‘Grandma, if mommy’s
seizures are gone she can drive, and we can go places by ourselves,’”
Tiffany said. “For so long I haven’t been able to be the mom
I wanted to be. I am so appreciative.”