Situation

I often get asked questions about epilepsy first aid or what do you do when someone has a seizure? Someone you care about has a seizure. How do you approach it? And there are some important things to sort of be aware of. First when someone has a seizure, and in general the type of seizures that we’re talking about for this type of issue is a convulsive seizure whereas clear cut, someone’s having a big old convulsion and it’s scary. They like they’re dying, they stopped breathing, their lips turn purple, they have fun with the mouth, there might be blood. What do you do? So the first thing I would tell people to do is check out the environment and make sure that person’s in a safe place. If they’re not in a safe place, try to safely move them. If you can. Next, let them have their seizure. Don’t hold them down and by, absolutely, there should be no reason that you stick anything in their mouth. And there’s this common fallacy that someone having a seizure will choke on their tongue. That won’t happen. But if you try to stick your finger in their mouth, they’ll bite your finger off, and then they’ll choke on that. So keep everything away from the mouth, let them have the seizure, time the seizure if you can. And then once the seizure is over, you want to turn them on their side. After the seizures over, they often will have a hard time protecting their airway. And sometimes people will get nauseated and vomit and they can actually choke on their own vomit. And so having them on their side protects their airway so that they can clear it.