It’s been over thirty years since that summer in 1979 when John Tilelli fell ill with meningitis. Contracted in a New York hospital where he worked to earn money for his college education, the illness put him at death’s door for six weeks with dangerously high fevers. Though he recovered and was able to get back to a normal life as a junior at St. Bonaventure University, normal lasted only until November.

Home from college and sitting with his family around their Thanksgiving dinner table, Tilelli suffered a seizure. He didn’t know it at the time, but it was the first of a series of epileptic seizures that would grow increasingly more frequent over the next three decades to the point where they nearly killed him. Last fall, while driving back to his Winchester, Va., home from his job in Chantilly, Tilelli suffered a seizure that lasted 40 minutes. He lost control of his car and hit another.

While no one was injured, Tilelli knew that his life had to change. Friends suggested he seek treatment answers through the University of Virginia Health System, but Tilelli, who has lived in Winchester for 16 years, scoffed. “Why would I do that?” he recalls saying. “I want to be home, near my family. We’ve got a great hospital here. It’s like a gold mine in our backyard.”

Working with neurologist Paul Lyons and neuro-surgeon Lee Selznick at Winchester Medical Center, Tilelli underwent months of careful evaluation. Doctors ultimately fund him to be a good candidate for surgery that was not available 30 years ago. In June 2009, Selznick removed a walnut-sized chunk of tissue from the right side of Tilelli’s brain. The tissue was badly scarred, most likely from the ferocious fevers caused by the meningitis attack in 1979. For years the scarred tissue literally had been seizing control of function in Tilelli’s brain, triggering random electrical charges rather than allowing a normal discharge of neural energy.

Following that Thanksgiving Day attack, Tilelli was placed on Dilantin which initially controlled his symptoms. He graduated from St. Bonaventure in 1981 and married two years later. His wife Shirley didn’t see a seizure for six years. But then the seizures started again and began coming more frequently. During a typical seizure, Tilelli would not lose consciousness, but he would become disoriented and not be able to grasp where he was. He lost muscular control, trembled and shook. The seizures would last from four to six minutes and when they cleared, his energy would be almost completely sapped.

Over the years, doctors increased the Dilantin, then combined it with other drugs. Each time, the seizures would cease for a time, but they would always return. He went from having four or five seizures a week to as many as six per day. Fortunately, Tilelli’s supervisors at Westcon Group, North America, a distributor of network products in Chantilly, were completely supportive of him—even when he would have seizures at work. Even so, he recalls, the drugs and the lost energy altered his personality.

Because the epilepsy was concentrated on the right side of his brain and hadn’t appeared to jump to the left side, doctors felt surgery could help Tilelli. They were right. “The day after my surgery,” says Tilelli, “I stopped having seizures. I cannot tell you what it is like after 30 years to wake up and not have seizures. It’s like waking from a dream.”

After the surgery, Tilelli says, his doctors told him that he faced a major, life changing experience. “We can fix you with meds and surgery and stitches,” he remembers being told, “but we recommend a treatment for you as whole person.” At their suggestion, Tilelli says, he began seeing Fred Sabia, a psychologist in Winchester and is glad he did.

“There was definitely an adjustment,” he says. “I felt different. I was trapped for 30 years in my body and all of a sudden I’m not trapped. I needed help adjusting to those new feelings.”

His family, he says, has been very supportive. “My wife now has a new husband and my two sons have a new Dad. I have a tremendous amount of energy that I didn’t have before. I used to go to bed at 9:30. Now I stay up until 1 a.m. and get up at 4:30 and ask ‘Where’s the next project?’”

His concentration has improved vastly, he says. Once an avid reader, he’d stopped reading for pleasure because he found his comprehension was poor. Now he reads the way he once did, for enjoyment, and has no trouble comprehending.

Tilelli feels so grateful about his recovery that he is working with the national epilepsy foundation to start a support group in the Winchester area. He’s even worked with Drs. Lyons and Selznick in coaching epilepsy patients. Winchester Medical Center invited him to speak to a group of patients about his experiences. When he finished, a 24-year-old man in the audience approached him and told him he also had suffered meningitis and now battled seizures.

“I gave him my name and number and told him to call me at any time,” says Tilelli. “I told him I waited 30 years for help, mostly because the technology didn’t exist. Don’t wait 30 years, I told him. Get the help you need now. That staff of nurses, I mean, they were on top of it. I got the greatest care you could ask for. I woke up at 2 a.m. one time and Dr. Lyons was sitting at my bedside. I said ‘Do you ever go to bed?’ They were awesome.”

You can reach John at johntilelli@aol.com.