Life Update (Diagnosed with Epilepsy)

Ok, here we go, you have this, oh God, how is this happening? I think we should start by saying that everything is fine, we are in a good place. MH, clearly, you don't have to wait until the end of the video to find that. but we want to tell you about the health journey Cara has been on over the past six years. It's like everything culminated and came to a head this year. This is the first time we've talked publicly about this. A few different reasons we'll get to, but yeah, we'll fill you in on everything and then tell you what this means to us in our

life

on our channel.

This is a bit of an unfair time for you. I'll be filming this, because you know, it's a more emotional time of the month than normal, we'll just say that before we start getting into things, I want to give my goals for this video and why we're making this video first and foremost, just I want it to be a reminder that you really don't know what other people are dealing with and you never know what goes on behind the scenes. I didn't expect this so soon. I think it's really important for a couple different reasons. one, you should never judge your

life

based on what you see someone else posting on social media and you should also probably extend more grace to people you see on social media and if you have been following our channel throughout 2024.

No you would have had an idea that some of this was happening and that's for a few different reasons. I wanted to have a complete story and all the answers before I published it because there was a lot of waiting and questions and unknowns. We're still achieving goal number three, uh, in case anyone else is going through something similar again, it's taken us six years to find out if this video helps a person who is going through what Cara went through in the last few years before this. great wi for the video yeah yeah anyone who is dealing with

epilepsy

or any other health issue just know that you are not alone.

If we post the phone until tomorrow, we'll sit. We said everything is fine. Let's bring positive vibes to this video. We don't want it to be sad. I think you just haven't talked about it out loud in a while. It was all my goals, yeah, I think we achieved them, in case you were wondering, Cara took some notes for this video. She just knew this was going to happen and she was just going to say so she wanted to structure that it's going well, let's get to the juicy stuff that we weren't there yet. I just want to talk to you about my

epilepsy

.

A journey that, as we said, has been going on for several years, but we will begin in January 2024. About 6 months ago, we have made it something of an annual tradition to do a life

update

video at the beginning of the year we like to reflect on the last year's trips and then we look forward to next year we do superlatives and it's so much fun this year's Life Update video we filmed in Nashville on New Year's Day 2024 and I opened up about the last one The year was a little rough for me , just in terms of stress and anxiety, we felt it was time to slow down a bit and shared that for the last 3 years leading up to this year we have been posting every Saturday all year long. and our goal for 2024 was to only post an average of three videos a month and just create a little space in our life and Nate specifically said, I don't think we know exactly what we're creating space for.

Turns out it was space for Doctor visits we filled the space, we found out what the space was for and I couldn't be more grateful that we had already made that decision. I think that made everything a little easier, since this could have come at a time in our lives. where we were just running full speed through this whole journey of traveling on YouTube and I think it's important to say that the moment we decided to slow down to three videos a month we knew something was going on but we didn't know what it was. It's the reason we were slowing down on YouTube in January.

I think we both just thought she was experiencing burnout because we'd seen so many YouTubers go through it like that was our diagnosis of the situation. Sorry to interrupt, but we have a very appropriate sponsor for today's video. Thank you. Best help for always supporting our channel. I think everyone knows by now that I'm a big fan of taking care of your mental health and I've had a lot of practice doing it over the last year and let me tell you, if you're struggling, it's worth investing in yourself. I don't know who needs to hear this, but take care.

I promise you, you will be so glad you did. I'm going to try not to cry again and therapy is a great way to do that, especially online therapy with better help. I can speak from personal experience. Better help couldn't be more convenient in case you haven't heard. Better help is amazing online help. therapy platform to get started, all you have to do is answer a few questions about yourself on their website and then they will connect you with one of their 30,000 licensed professional therapists who best suits your needs and preferences, once they have matched you . someone you can start communicating with in whatever way you're most comfortable with, whether that's a phone call, video chat, or message, but if for some reason you don't feel like it's a good fit, it's free and easy to switch to someone new , so if therapy sounds like something you like that you might also benefit from, just go to Betterhelp.com, Carara and Nate, it's also linked in the description or choose Cara and Nate when you sign up for a discount account especially in your first month of therapy.

Well, come back to the video 3 days after uploading it. In that life

update

video we flew to Colorado we had said we were going to take 6 weeks off and we asked ourselves where do we want to spend 6 weeks off work skiing in Colorado so that was a plan so here's where yeah , things really simply? I started going downhill on January 5th after our first night in Colorado. Do you want to tell this part? I feel like you're going to get through this. It's good. Oh, it wasn't supposed to be like this. Yes, the first morning we were in Colorado I woke up.

Until Cara had a massive seizure for the first time, yeah, that had never happened before. I feel like maybe this all feels a little dramatic. I had never seen anyone have a seizure before. I don't know if this is normal um I don't really want to go into all the details but 3 minutes went by she wasn't breathing so I was asleep and the first thing I remember is Nate sitting next to the bed and saying do you want to? a cup of coffee obviously Nate brings me coffee every morning so I thought it was weird that he asked me and he went to get the coffee and came back and handed it to me and said do you know where we are, which was really It's weird for him to say that and I said Colorado and immediately saw the relief on his face when he said you just had a seizure.

I mean, honestly, it's one of the worst moments of my entire life, just knowing that Nate had to go through that. and he's still dramatized by it, obviously, at first I was in shock, I thought I felt normal and then I realized I had a big cut on my tongue that I would like to bite off, so we got up and drove to the emergency room , which thanks. It was just down the road, the positive side of things is that we have been in a lot of things that could have happened in a much worse place, in a lot of remote places over the years, they could have been very bad, but we told you What happened and they We did a lot of tests and they asked me a lot of questions and they did a CT scan and fortunately we knew right away that everything looked normal.

I mean, we had to sit in the waiting room for an hour waiting for the results and it was like, is this a brain tumor that's going to change our lives forever? The emergency room doctor. I don't think he knew why it happened, but his best guess was that it had something to do with the altitude, so it was like this was like this freak accident. I hope so. It doesn't happen again, which is disturbing. He referred me to a primary care doctor and the soonest I could get there was 2 weeks later, so we were in Colorado trying to pretend everything was fine for the next 2 weeks like there was nothing else.

We could do it, but we tried to get on with our lives, go skiing, we were with some friends and family and it was a rollercoaster of two, there were a lot of really good moments too. I think this is extra emotional because it's not something we talk about a lot, like most days we just try to get on with life as normal, most days we might like it, it's just reflecting on it, that's the difficult part, yes, so January 26, 2024, my appointment with the primary. The care doctor finally arrives here. It's just a random place in Colorado.

I don't know this person. I don't have a primary care doctor. This was like a seizure follow-up appointment, like when you go to the ER for something to just make sure you don't die and then go to a primary care doctor to basically diagnose the underlying condition, so we told him everything what we had done since the seizure and she gave me a covid test and it was positive first. positive covid test for the first time who knew I had had what I would consider a mild cold the last two weeks. She didn't have a fever and she basically said the combination of having Covid and then flying at altitude is probably what triggered the seizure. but she didn't know, she told me that the next step should be to see a neurologist.

I don't have a neurologist and for the last 8 years, in case you don't know, we haven't had a home. We bounced around different centers since our parents are in Nashville, we spent a lot of time here in Colorado so it took us a few weeks to finally get to a neurologist and we finally ended up in Dallas where my sister lives because she was having a baby. and I knew I was going to see her very soon, so it made sense that Dallas is a big airport, we knew we could keep traveling, I went to see the neurologist, they would tell me everything, okay, everything would be behind us.

I did not do it. I realized what a big commitment it was at that moment. I thought: Where do we want to go? To have a visit to the doctor. No. This is going to be like our new halfway home. The healthcare system in the US. Fortunately, we have been healthy. The entire time we have been traveling, our family has been healthy for the most part. It's crazy to me that something really bad has happened and you need to find out what's going on, but it's a six-week process to get an appointment to talk. someone to start the process.

I couldn't get an appointment with a neurologist in Dallas until April 17th, it was January 26th, so once again we were pretending everything was fine, carrying on with life as usual, it was definitely in the back of my mind. all day, every day, but there was no reason to worry because there was nothing I could do until I saw the neurologist, so for the next 2 and a half months we just rode some trains, rented a Tesla, drove around Oman and a Unimog. I ran a marathon in Tunisia, finally my first appointment with the neurologist is around April 17th.

I was in a really good place, we had a lot of fun, my sister had her baby. I was at her house cuddling all the babies before I went to the hospital. hospital and met the neurologist for the first time. I had no idea what to expect. I just put it out of my mind for so long that it felt weird that I was still doing this. she enters. I told him everything that happened in January. Then she started asking me all these questions about my life and my past, like how was school, do I get headaches, and I started telling her some things that I've been dealing with over the last few years and this is the reason.

I want to tell you about those things, so I'm going to pause where we're in the doctor's office and go back to 2018 for a minute. I will take you on the journey that I took her. updating her on some things that have been going on, so if the story wasn't long enough, now we go back 5 years, it's 2018, the young and vibrant Ken Nate had been traveling for 2 and A2 years practically daily vlogging. The whole time we were going so hard and so fast like we were taking advantage of every opportunity that came our way, we were running on pure excitement and adrenaline, yes, and at some point in 2018 I started experiencing what I started calling dizziness out of nowhere.

Being sitting, I could be lying down, I could be standing, this feeling would take over me, it would only last a few seconds, where I would feel like a little dizzy, but really out of it, almost like a feeling of Deja Vu, like I normally do. . I'm still pretty aware of what's going on. If you talk to me and look at me, you probably won't even realize what's happening. It might distract me from what you're saying like you know when you stand up. too fast and you feel like wow, that was weird, it's kind of like that, except I didn't have to get up quickly, like it happened out of nowhere.

I still have a hard time understanding this. Don't know. HEin the future and if the scar tissue has disappeared, that would mean that it was the big seizure that caused it; Otherwise you were probably born with it, the hippocampus is in charge. memory retrieval and according to this article I read on the internet it's like the librarian of your memories so your memories are stored in a part of your brain and the hippocampus when it's like oh I need to remember this memory it's like the librarian who goes and grabs it off the shelf and it's like the memory is here and that explains a lot when it comes to my memory problems.

Let's say you're like 90% a normal person when it comes to memory. Thanks just for giving me a little perspective. I mean, it's just a weird social thing, like sometimes I can't remember conversations I've had with people like I haven't seen someone in a long time and they mention something we talked about, like there are so many times in which which I would just say is actually the hardest part of memory, the social part, yeah, social with you, I can be like filming myself, I don't remember, yeah, because I think people think that you just don't care and you don't listen. yeah, and that really hurts, so let's get back to the brain, the other side effect you mentioned of these focal seizures and scarring on the hippo campus was emotions, which also explains a lot of things I realized earlier in the video things we talked about, like how hard we were working and hustling and stuff, but I really think last year was no burnout.

I shouldn't say this, the part of my brain, yeah, that was having focal seizures, I think was causing me these extreme emotions and it just wasn't like me and I was blaming stress, but maybe it was. It's not my fault, so we talked about medications for a while, like there were tons of different ones and they were all for different types of seizures and types of people, and she made her best guess about what she thought would work best for my body and began. She left me on this really small dose, so that night I started taking the medication and after a week of the small dose she increased it to the next dose which was a little bit larger, it's every day, twice a day and I just had no idea how my body was doing. react to it, so we decided we were going to take this time to stay in one place and just eliminate all the different factors, like I didn't want to wonder if you knew I was jet lagged or if it was the medication or if I ate something bad or if it was medication, we were just trying to put as much control in our life as possible, which meant moving back to Colorado and trying to live a normal life for a while, it could have been pretty intense. side effects that would have made it very difficult to film well for a living, but I think some people experience exhaustion when they start taking the medicine, mood swings, depression, like all those things that just make me feel generally very bad and I didn't want to have to do it. pretend I didn't feel bad because I wasn't really ready to like him.

I didn't want to make this video until we had a full story so it's taken us a little longer to post and if you've been following me on Instagram you know I've been missing for a lot of days and then you'll get a random video of me cooking and yeah, we got it. We have been taking it easy seeing how these medications work. it affects my body and it's also been emotional, like I'm one of those people that I don't even take an Advil and unless I'm in the fetal position with pain, cramps, that's the only time to accept it.

Maybe I can take cations for the rest of my life, but the good news is this is the positive part so far, it's been a month, yes, no side effects or seizures so far. I'm very grateful, so we're in a good place. It feels like the medicine is working, yeah, the last thing I wanted to happen was for this to not work and I had to start over, but it seems like there's still a chance for that to happen, okay, yeah, and if it does, It's okay, yes. and now that it's all there I also feel like I can be a lot more open about it, you know, if something else happens, I think we're going to be a lot quicker to share it, it's kind of like this.

Something weird that we kept a secret for so long that you know, imagine last week we were in the British Virgin Islands living like kings and queens. If I had talked about feeling really bad, it just wouldn't have made any sense, no one. want to hear someone who's had this experience talk like, oh, I'm not feeling 100%, I just never felt like it was the right time in any of our videos to bring it up, so I'm going back to the neurologist one more time soon and she'll evaluate how the medication goes and we'll go from there, but we're really just taking this one day at a time.

We are going to continue this year with our goal of publishing three times a month and prioritizing our health and our sleep. especially because we know that that's a big trigger, it's a little complicated with our life what we do, but I think my biggest question right now is what's working, is it the medication, is it the constant sleep or is it the combination of both. we have to have both or we can go back to very normal care and have Nate live on the medicine and that solves everything, but yeah, so it looks like everything is looking great right now, but there are still a lot of questions and there's a chance that 14 different medications, there is a chance this one won't work and if this one doesn't work when we travel another might work, this might be a long process, we really are in as good a place as I promise, I just was today. a lot of the emotions here come from reliving some of the most traumatic parts of this and two, we've talked about making this video for a long time, so I think it's also a bit of a relief to post it, yeah, thanks for being patient with us and listen to us and I don't know, I can't decide if I should ask if anyone else is going through this if they have any similar advice or if you are going through this but it's not random advice from people. opinions yes, they are not medical professionals or they are not dealing with this person, you are a neurologist and you have other opinions and you do not have a six week vacation plan this year and you would like to have a new patient again, this was supposed to be be like good positive vibes.

I don't really feel like it went in that direction, but I do feel like the takeaway from this should be that, all things considered, this diagnosis was probably the best-case scenario, given everything she'd been through. Over the past 5 years, major seizure is now a treatable condition that you should be able to live with forever. Yes, I will link the website in the description which has given me a lot of comfort. I know one in every 100 Americans. 1%, so more than 3 million people in the US live with epilepsy. I had no idea, thank you for being here to help me as if I were the one with the diagnosis, but stop it, you can't carry this.

Nate said he'd deal with a lot, so thanks. You wouldn't rather live with anyone else, let's say something positive, okay, the next video we post on this channel will be Cara living her best life. Oh wow, okay, it's more emotional than I think we both expected. that's right thanks for being here