Life Is "Recaptured" for Cambria Woman

By Ann Saul Dudurich
Tribune-Review
Monday, March 7, 2005

"For 25 years, I was a prisoner."

Debra Carpenter, of Geistown, Cambria County, was stuck in an unhappy marriage. Worse, she couldn't drive; a captive to unpredictable epileptic seizures.

"It was a very dark period in my life. I felt trapped," said the owner of Debton Medical Consultants, in Johnstown.

Due to a congenital disorder -- osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease -- Carpenter spent much of her childhood confined in a cast.

"One hundred thirty-six broken legs and three broken arms," she said with a laugh.

When the New Kensington native turned 13, a surgeon recommended her crooked leg be re-broken and straightened. Prior to the operation, a "spinal" was administered to anesthetize the lower half of her body.

"But they made a mistake and numbed me from the waist up," she said.

She couldn't move her upper body.

"And my vocal chords were paralyzed," Carpenter said. "So I couldn't tell them I was awake. When they snapped my leg, I passed out."

Complex partial seizures, characterized by confusion and temporary loss of memory, resulted from the trauma.

"At 13, the seizures were bearable," she said. "As a professional adult, they were horrible."

Carpenter, who took nine pills a day to help control the seizures, recalled a business trip several years ago.

"I got off the airplane and all of a sudden, I didn't know where I was or who I was," she said. "A gentleman found me crying and looked at my tickets. He told me my name was Debra Carpenter. I might as well have been Susan Smith."

The 47-year-old businesswoman was devastated.

"My physician said, 'Debbie, we've come to a point where we've got to get you to Pittsburgh. There is a doctor out there who is doing phenomenal things with surgery. And I think you might be a candidate.'"

He referred her to Dr. James Valeriano, director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at Allegheny General Hospital, in Pittsburgh. After nearly eight weeks of rigorous memory testing and neuroimaging to determine the origin of the seizures, Carpenter was cleared for surgery. She met with

Dr. Jack Wilberger, chairman of the neurosurgery department at the North Side hospital.

He detailed the benefits and risks of temporal lobectomy surgery -- a procedure in which a portion of the brain is removed in an effort to control seizures. The goal: independence.

"There were no doubts," she said. "This was something I knew I needed to do."

On June 14, 2004, Wilberger removed a portion of Carpenter's right temporal lobe.

Nearly a year out from surgery, the Richland Township resident remains seizure-free.

"Not a one," she said. "And I'm talking I had those spells five, six, seven times a day."

Carpenter remains on two daily medications, Topamax and Zonegran. She's got her driver's license; she's getting a divorce.

"I like to say I've recaptured life," she emphasized. "That's what Dr. Wilberger did for me. Otherwise, I'd have been living that hell for the rest of my life."

Ann Saul Dudurich can be reached at adudurich@tribweb.com or (724) 837-4378.