DATE: Monday, September 1, 1997             TAG: 9709010092

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MARIE JOYCE, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   95 lines

MAN CELEBRATES EPILEPSY ``CURE'' 2 SEIZURE-FREE YEARS MEAN BRAIN SURGERY WAS SUCCESSFUL.

For nearly 20 years, Jack H. Pearce Jr. lived in fear of his epilepsy, waiting for the next seizure to grab him and throw him to the ground.

The disease robbed him of his independence, he says. He lost his driver's license and had to depend on others to get around. It embarrassed him at work. It made him drop out of activities like softball, where others might witness him having an attack.

Then, in August 1995, Pearce became one of the first people to undergo an operation new to Hampton Roads, a radical procedure in which a portion of his brain was removed.

After the surgery, a different kind of waiting began. Would it work? Would he be able to resume his old, active life? Or would the seizures return?

Last week, Pearce, a Virginia Beach resident, passed a milestone that his surgeon says should bring the anxiety and the fears to an end: He completed his second year without a seizure.

``The odds of him having anything further down the road become very, very small'' after two years, said Dr. Jonathan P. Partington. ``In essence, he is cured.''

Pearce allowed a Virginian-Pilot reporter and photographer to follow him through the long preparation process and the surgery, and the paper published a series of stories about him.

The operation, which works only with certain cases of epilepsy, removed brain tissue that had been damaged in an accident.

Doctors couldn't know immediately if the operation worked. For one thing, the brain doesn't like to be tinkered with, and Pearce suffered a seizure the night of the operation, probably as a reaction.

After the operation, Pearce and his family marked time, each seizure-free day increasing the odds that Partington had successfully removed all the problem tissue.

Pearce went on with his life. He got his driver's license back six months after the operation. He changed jobs twice; he's now an investigator for a firm that tracks delinquent car loans.

``It was like walking on eggshells for a while,'' recalled Linda Vaughn, the nurse who is clinical coordinator of Sentara Norfolk General's Epilepsy Program. ``Once he got that driver's license and he could drive again, it was like: `I can do anything.' ''

His neurologist, Dr. Joseph Hogan, lowered Pearce's dose of anti-seizure medicine gradually; stopping abruptly can trigger seizures even in people like Pearce who may not have epilepsy anymore.

Pearce had been taking so much medicine that his hands shook and he had barely enough energy to make it through work. Even then, the medicine didn't work all the time.

But as the dose dropped, he felt his energy coming back. He worked in the yard more.

Recently, he said, he and his wife, Laurie, were at a party. ``Laurie was telling me, `I'm tired,' '' he said with a laugh. ``I said, `C'mon, let's get up there and dance.' ''

At some point, maybe six months ago, he realized that he no longer had to live each day with the possibility of a seizure - warning new co-workers, worrying that he would hurt himself if it happened when he was shaving.

Then, without fanfare, he passed the second anniversary of his last seizure.

It was over.

Pearce had suffered epilepsy since 1976, when he tripped stepping off a curb, smacked his head on the side of his car, and experienced cerebral bleeding that killed some of his brain tissue. The useless tissue was susceptible to renegade electric impulses that would dance across his brain, shaking him like a rag doll for a minute or so and then letting him go.

Now, he says, he feels like he did before the accident.

Eventually, he and Hogan will have to decide whether to wean him from the small dose of anti-seizure medicine phenobarbital that he takes each night before bed.

Pearce still has some damaged brain tissue that wasn't removed because electrode monitoring showed it wasn't the source of the seizures. There's a very slight possibility that the medicine is controlling minor seizures that occur there, said Partington.

Vaughn said many people decide to continue taking small doses of the medicine.

That's Pearce's plan. ``Why push my luck?''

Twelve other people have had the surgery here since the program's start in 1995, though most still haven't hit the two-year mark. Two more patients are scheduled for operations in September, said Vaughn.

Pearce has become a guide to other patients facing the surgery, she said.

``I didn't really have but one person I could talk to,'' he said, and that person had not gone through all the testing that Pearce had to do.

He's honest with them. Some of the testing is painful. And after surgery, he suffered an excruciating headache. But he tells them it's worth it.

``You can bear with it, for what you've gone through,'' he said. ``You can bear with it. And that's it.'' MEMO: TO LEARN MORE

For more information on Sentara Norfolk General's Epilepsy Program, call

668-3127. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]

Jack Pearce Jr.

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