Recognizing epilepsy awareness on World Purple Day

JENN OCAMPO KING: I'm Jenn Ocampo King. On March 26, we recognize Purple Day, an international grassroots effort to increase awareness about epilepsy. And today I'm so excited to be joined by Maida Sosa Velazquez, manager of communications at TD Securities. During this podcast, we will discuss Maida journey to learn and trust herself again after her epilepsy diagnosis, and the role strong women have played in her life. Maida, thank you so much for joining us today. Before we get started, we would love to hear your TD story.

MAIDA SOSA-VELAZQUEZ: Of course. And thanks so much Jenn for having me on here. I'm so excited to share my story. As far as TD goes, I've been at TD nearly four years now, going on four years, starting at TD Asset Management as a communications analyst, and then transitioning into my current role as a Communications Manager at TD Securities. So, lots of learning, but lots of meeting amazing people across the board and just putting a lot of skills to use.

JENN OCAMPO KING: Love it. Let's get started. Purple Day, the global observance for epilepsy awareness will be observed on March 26. Can you share why this day has such a personal significance to you?

MAIDA SOSA-VELAZQUEZ: Well, epilepsy is something that's always played a tremendous role in my life. I actually was diagnosed as epileptic. I have been since I was 18 years old. I'm 33 now. So, it's been a long journey. Epilepsy means very many things to me. But when I had my first tonic clonic seizure, which for-- I like to educate folks too on epilepsy because I've had to learn as I've gone along too, and it's basically, your brain communicates to your body through neurons. And when your neurons misfire for whatever reason in whatever area of your brain, then that creates a seizure. So, it's almost like a shutdown of your body, depending on what kind of seizure you have. And that's what happened to me at the tender age of 18 in my bathroom. I had a five-second aura. So, five seconds to understand what was happening. I called for my sister, and then I completely blacked out and woke up to paramedics in my kitchen and not understanding why they were there. And the rest was just a journey of being diagnosed, trying to understand what was happening, being on medication and not working, coming off of the medication, and then being seizure-free for about a decade before my recent seizure at around 30 years old. So, it's been quite a journey. I've had to learn a lot about epilepsy to be honest. Before I was diagnosed, I'd only heard of epilepsy in-- to be honest, I've heard a lot of jokes about it. I had seen it mentioned with hyperbole. So, people would be like, oh, you know-- not to me specifically, but I'd heard it in jokes like, don't get panicked, don't go and have a seizure, things like that. And now I'm so much more aware of what people are saying when they say that and it's just-- yeah, it's still very highly stigmatized, still very mysterious, and there's so much more to learn. But I think the day of epilepsy is an epilepsy awareness overall. It's important because you could have someone in your life or know somebody directly who suffers from epilepsy and it can be very debilitating. In my family alone, there's about four or five people who suffer from it. So, it's important to advocate for what epilepsy is, and just really spread the word so that people can understand what they're saying when they talk about epilepsy, how to help if someone's having a seizure, and how to move forward and live a normal life as best as possible.

JENN OCAMPO KING: Thank you for sharing that. I can't even imagine how scary and hard this journey has been for you. How did you learn to get through it?

MAIDA SOSA-VELAZQUEZ: It was-- I want to say I'm still learning. I don't think it's something I'll ever completely 100% master, just because the body is such an intricate system. And I learned through this diagnosis that when something goes wrong in the body and the body's your home, you have nowhere to hide, you can't run anywhere. You go to sleep with it, you wake up with it, you go through your day with it. So yeah, it was very difficult. Fear played a huge role in my life. Fear and anxiety. And when people talk about disabilities, anxiety is one of those things where someone could be right next to you having incredible anxiety and it won't present. Sometimes you have no idea. And my particular fear over losing control of my body, I would say, had a bigger aftermath in my life than the seizures themselves, because I totally forgot how to trust myself. And when I was diagnosed, the doctors were like, listen, escalators are going to be harmful. If you cross the street, be careful because you could collapse. Obviously, traveling alone, taking baths, using the stove, simple things that I had to slowly learn to reconquer. And you look at something like a stove top and it's just an everyday thing, but I had to look at it and I had to face that. Oh no, if I'm some type of time bomb and something goes wrong, what will happen? And then you ask yourself these scary questions like, what if I'm alone and it happens? And the scarier question, which is, what if I'm in public when it happens? So, there's no real safe space. I had to really build one from scratch and push myself into really fearful situations so that I could relearn to trust myself. So, I traveled alone. I would go on my lunch breaks. Working at the TD tower near the Union Station, I would just go into the path of my lunch break and go on every escalator I could find, go on every escalator across the Eaton Center, just to get on and be like, everything is fine, trust yourself, it will be OK. Yeah, just every opportunity I could to face those little fears, I just jumped into, because I knew that I needed that to move forward into the next step of my life or I would always be afraid.

JENN OCAMPO KING: I completely resonate with what you're saying. I recently went through a health scare, and that fear of, is it going to happen again? What's going to happen next? The resilience that you need to build. It's amazing just hearing the things that you have done. March also marks International Women's Day on March 8. What advice would you offer to women who are facing challenges? And what role did other women play in your life in your journey?

MAIDA SOSA-VELAZQUEZ: I would say, as women, it's just important to uplift one another. I've had so much support from women across my life. I am surrounded by strong women. So many that have pushed me, and when I fall in, giving me the hand to get back up. I've had women listen to my stories. I've heard stories from women. I've connected and bonded with women. It's really been an amazing journey building those female relationships. And I would say with women, the only thing I would ever advise another woman is to just-- however difficult it is to find your authentic voice, push to find it because life is short. And often, we can be taught that if something is important to us, it's really a grain of sand if you look at the big picture. Whatever is important to you and in your life could be tremendously important to someone else. The problem is that, as women, we may have learned at one point or another that oversharing, being emotional, being vulnerable, are not characteristics of strength. And they are. Those qualities are really important to not only develop really good self-esteem, self-worth, understand your value, but to pull that out of other people, because you can struggle alone or you can struggle in company. And when you struggle in company, you make it so that someone else maybe, hopefully, struggles a little bit less. So, I think as women, it's important to share our triumphs, our hardships, and to just elevate, offer that hand to one another in the workplace, at home, during coffee because I think we have so much more in common than we could ever imagine.

JENN OCAMPO KING: Wow. Maida, thank you so much for sharing your incredible story. You have amazing strength and resilience. You have inspired us all today.

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