Voice of Experience

After the first seizure, Hollander was taken by ambulance to Suburban Hospital. No one said the word "epilepsy." There was talk about the mussels she had eaten the night before, the way one of them didn't taste quite right. Toxins could cause a seizure. Lots of things could.

The next day, she went to the Neurology Center in Rockville for a follow-up appointment. Of all that would happen in coming years, this moment would provide the one happy detour. In the reception area was the office's manager, Steve Long. Hollander's sister, Susanna Gilbert, thought he was cute, and urged Diana to ask him out. She hesitated, but went back the next day and gave her business card to her neurologist. In case, she said, his office manager was interested. He was.

"I don't normally make a practice of dating the patients of the physician," Long says, laughing now at the memory. "That was never my intent. It's kind of a conflict of interest. But since she made the first move . . . the doctor was our matchmaker."

There was an immediate comfort level for Hollander in that Long knew what seizures were and had seen them in his work. Over the next several months -- when she started having regular seizures, almost always in her sleep -- they continued to date, and Hollander was officially diagnosed with epilepsy.

"I knew what I was getting into," Long says. "It was something that I felt we could handle, deal with. It didn't turn me off, and it didn't give me a whole lot of trepidation."

No matter how prepared he was for it, though, it still hit hard when he first witnessed one of Hollander's seizures. It was at night, in bed, after they had been dating for about six months.

"It freaked me out," Long says. "She made some crying noises right before she went into this grand mal seizure. It really did throw me for a loop. I was totally asleep, and I heard this going on, and I woke up in a start and there she was, having a seizure."

With the seizures coming almost exclusively at night, Hollander continued to work steadily. By late 1999, though, they started to occur during the daytime. She had another one at the office. She had them in public, and grew to hate the way people looked at her, with a mixture of pity and revulsion that was terribly humiliating.

But her relationship flourished. She and Long moved in together, settling in the house in Potomac. It was on the drive home one day that she realized she was about to have a seizure in her car, and pulled over. The reality of what might have happened was startling, and the next day she stopped driving. The little black two-seater she adores still sits in her driveway; she stubbornly refuses to give it up.

Losing that privilege hit hard, and combined with her increasing fear of public seizures, it pushed Hollander to a place where she became more and more homebound. Still, she was excited about the ski trip she and Long planned in January 2001. They were in Aspen for only about 30 minutes, though, before Hollander had a seizure. She had another one the very next day.

"I got scared," she says. "I got really, really scared that something was happening, something was changing. It was getting worse."

She went home, and took a leave of absence from WGMS. Months dragged by, and she became more and more terrified. The seizures were totally unpredictable, both in timing and frequency. New medications and new combinations of medication didn't seem to be working. Eventually, when it appeared she would not be able to return to work, WGMS let her go.

"That was a difficult period for both her and the station," Allison, the program director, says. "We wanted her to recover, but she was having such a difficult time she couldn't be on the air."

Listeners called and e-mailed, but WGMS officials had to be careful how they explained her departure. Hollander was not willing to be public about her condition. She had locked herself into a place where she was feeling frustrated, and desperate, and angry, and, yes, ashamed. She knows, now, that 2.3 million Americans suffer from epilepsy, and that it is not something she needs to hide from the world. Then, though, her fear overruled almost everything.