CFN – In January of 2007, my wife Christine Lowe and I posted a video on Youtube of Christine having an epileptic seizure.
We’d searched Youtube with the words “epilepsy”, “seizure”, “seize”, and so on, and found little of any real worth. Kids faking them for a laugh, flickering cartoons that can cause them, or grainy hospital-surveilliance footage of a person twitching in a bed while an EEG graph scrolls along one side of the screen. None of the footage was very compelling.
We immediately prepared the footage we had from a January 2003 incident where we caught one of Christine’s seizures in such amazing detail on video. We added text, about how to deal with a seizure and the benefits of medical marijuana, over the footage, uploaded it, and sent out a press release. About thirteen minutes later, Jon Willing from the Ottawa Sun called to ask if I was insane. It was in the Ottawa Sun the next day: LINK
The video immediately started getting over 1000 hits per day, and many, many comments. Most quite nice – like one guy who saw his friend’s dog seize, then went home and looked seizures up on line.
.
He saw our video and weeks later someone seized in his place of work. While everyone else stood stunned or freaked out, he knew just what to do. Might have saved the person’s life, he told us in an email.
Other comments are merely the droppings of internet mongrels. One gets used to finding a turd in the mailbox each morning. But we leave them all there, so that people can get an idea of the kind of things epileptics have to put up with.
We have had requests from people as young as high school, and professors from Universities, asking if they can use it for a presentation in class. Of course, we tell all of these people to use it as they please.
The video showed up in an article in the Guardian in the UK (LINK), where people huffed about how it was exploitive. Our retort was
published a short while later: LINK
We noticed also, early on, that people complained about the text, that there was too much, and it went by too fast. So we put up the second one – this one (LINK) – on Sept. 8, 2007.
The first one reached one million hits in the summer of 2010. Kelly Egan at the Citizen did an article about it: LINK
Shortly after that, at 1.21 million hits or so, the video was pulled by Youtube – ostensibly because someone complained about all the marijuana references, which violates their policy. We were surprised it had managed to stay up as long as it did, quite frankly.
The two videos have been seen by an estimated 2.21 million people on Youtube alone. Our Youtube page has over 2,768,000 hits – almost all of them are from those two videos. The videos were also used during a segment on a Japanese 90-minute morning live chat TV show, on the US television show “The Doctors”, and in jails and hospitals to train staff.
So the video that remains has just gone over 1 million hits on Sept. 11, 2012.
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