💜 Would You Know What To Do? Epilepsy South Eastern Ontario and Vivienne Le

I wasn't there.

A friend and neighbour of mine here in Bayridge had a seizure on their front lawn. I heard about it afterward, second-hand and a few days late. What I kept circling back to wasn't the seizure itself. It was that somebody else happened to be close by, and that person knew exactly what to do.

I wouldn't have. I'd have been standing on that lawn, panicking with 911 ringing on speakerphone and my thumb hovering over a search bar, trying to Google my way through something that was already happening. Next to useless, in the one moment that counted.

About 1 in 100 Canadians lives with epilepsy. Think of a hundred people you actually know. One of them has it, and you may have no idea who.

That's what makes it so easy to put off. There's no warning, so there's never an obvious day to get ready. But the neighbour who knew what to do wasn't braver than me, and wasn't quicker on their feet. Somebody had taught them, at some point. And Epilepsy South Eastern Ontario will teach you the same thing, for free.

Seizure first aid is the part I'd never heard of, and it's the part that would have made me useful on that lawn. They'll come to a workplace, a school, a community centre, and teach it, and they don't charge a cent for it. You give them the room. They give your people the thing my neighbour already had.

The training is only the front door, though. Most of what they do happens after a diagnosis, when a family is sitting at a kitchen table with a word they don't understand and a stack of appointments they didn't ask for. There's counselling. There are support groups. There's a working relationship with local clinics, nurses, and specialists, so that a newly diagnosed person isn't left to figure out the whole system alone.

And they cover more ground than you'd guess. Not just Kingston, but rural Frontenac, Lennox and Addington, Leeds and Grenville, and out into Hastings and Prince Edward. Their office is a unit on Princess Street. Their service area is most of the southeast corner of the province.

It started smaller than that. In 1985, Katherine Manley founded the organization out of her family's basement here in Kingston, after her daughter Jessica was diagnosed with epilepsy and she found there was nowhere to turn. So she built somewhere. Four decades and two name changes later, it's still doing the job she started it to do.

Vivienne Le was twelve when she was diagnosed with epilepsy.

Every third Sunday in July, they park a fire truck downtown and invite people to haul it.

Eight people, a rope, and 37,000 pounds. The truck has to move 100 feet.

The distance isn't arbitrary. It's 100 feet because it's 1 in 100. Every team that leans into that rope is hauling the statistic down the street.

It's also deeply silly. There are purple tutus. There are prizes for best costume and best team spirit sitting right alongside the one for fastest pull time. They've been at this for over a decade, and the photo archive suggests nobody's dignity comes through it fully intact.

This year it lands on Sunday, July 19, at Confederation Park. Go and cheer.

The pull is the loud one, but it isn't the only one. Every October they run the Purple Pumpkin Contest. You decorate a pumpkin purple, send in a photo, and their community votes on it, with prizes by age group from little kids up through adults. It costs nothing and it asks nothing of you except a pumpkin, which is about as low as a bar can go.

There's one thank you Vivienne wanted in here, and it's from the whole organization. Loblaws at the Kingston Centre gave ESEO the floor space to sell 50/50 raffle tickets, and then made a donation on top of that, which is what puts refreshments in the hands of the hardworking volunteers and teams on pull day. It's the sort of help that never makes it onto a poster, and without which the poster wouldn't matter much.

There were two neighbours on that lawn. One of them knew what to do.

Here's the part I'd have got wrong. The instinct is to hold someone down and force something into their mouth, and both are wrong. Nobody swallows their tongue, and prying a jaw open breaks teeth. What you actually do is move the hard things out of the way, protect their head, loosen anything tight around their neck, and then let it happen. Don't restrain them. When it stops, roll them onto their side and stay until they know where they are. If it runs past five minutes, that's an emergency and you call 911.

Knowing that on a screen and knowing it on a lawn are two different things. Epilepsy South Eastern Ontario will show you what to do and the right way to do it, in your workplace or your kid's school, and they won't charge you for it.