HACKETTSTOWN -- In 2005, Corey and Courtney Derr were on a walk in their neighborhood in Hackettstown, an area Courtney had been familiar with for many years, when she stopped walking and stared blankly ahead of her.

HACKETTSTOWN -- In 2005, Corey and Courtney Derr were on a walk in their neighborhood in Hackettstown, an area Courtney had been familiar with for many years, when she stopped walking and stared blankly ahead of her.

As her husband recalls, Courtney, 23 at the time, then began to walk in the opposite direction of her house and said she was going home.

"At first I thought she was joking around but realized that she was serious," he said. "I told her home was the other direction, and as we started to walk home, she didn't seem to know where exactly we were going."

That was when they decided to call the neurologist.

After thorough testing, Derr was diagnosed with complex partial seizures, a type of epilepsy, which is a neurologic disorder caused by abnormal activity in the nervous cell of the brain.

For the past 10 years, Derr felt she was "chained down" due to her seizures, which had been occurring at least three times a week, lasting just over a few minutes each time. The seizures prevented her from being able to attend church and go to the gym -- her raised heartbeat actually caused seizures -- and she even had her license stripped by her doctor.

Today, Derr will quote the lyrics of "Amazing Grace" -- "My chains are broke, I've been set free" -- when she discusses her new life.

Derr's epileptologist, Dr. Eric Geller, director of the Adult Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, had tried Derr on 17 different medications. Either she didn't find relief from them or she was allergic.

Geller turned to vagus nerve stimulation, a device implanted into the chest with electrodes wrapped around the vagus nerve close to the vocal cords, but it caused her vocal cord issues and did nothing for the seizures.

That was when Geller suggested the Neuropace RNS System, where a small, battery-powered neurostimulator is implanted at the base of the skull and is connected to thin wires with electrodes. The thin wires are placed on the parts of the brain that have abnormal electrical activity and delivers brief pulses of stimulation to disrupt the activity.

"It is like a heart pacemaker but for the brain," Geller said. "Of course, people don't feel these shocks and I can watch the brain waves right in front of me on my computer because there is a radiotransmitter."

Derr had the surgery, which required the surgeon to cut six spots into her head, in November 2015. Although it took many months to adjust, Derr is happy with the outcome and feels her life is back on track.

When at home, Derr has a handheld wand that she waves over the implanted device on the top of her skull on a daily basis.

It collects data from the neurostimulator and is automatically sent to a database the doctor can retrieve to help adjust the device if necessary.

Derr's seizures have reduced, and when they do occur, it is often at night while she is sleeping and they don't even wake her.

With more than 100,000 people diagnosed with seizures each year in New Jersey alone, according to Geller, it is important to Derr and her doctors to let those suffering with seizures know that it is possible to find the proper treatment and go on with life.

"Be patient and kind to yourself; have a strong support system and know that there is an answer out there for you," Derr said.

Although medication is recommended for those with seizures, it doesn't work in one of every three people diagnosed with epilepsy, Geller said.

"When medication isn't working for a patient, we evaluate other kinds of therapy, including brain surgery (where we) take away a piece of the brain that is causing the seizures," Geller said.

Although Derr's seizures didn't begin until she was 23 -- she is now 34 -- she was born with a birth defect that caused gray matter to spread from the middle of her brain to both sides, causing, what she calls, a "helmet of gray matter."

Since the seizures occur on both sides of her brain, Geller said that it is impossible to take out both sides of the brain through surgery since it would require taking out too much.

According to Dr. Jeffrey Politsky, director of the Epilepsy Program at Overlook Medical Center and Atlantic Neuroscience Institute in the Atlantic Health System, symptoms of a seizure vary from patient to patient depending on the part of the brain where the seizure occurs.

When Derr gets a seizure, the left side of her body goes numb, her fingers begin to have uncontrolled movements, her lips smack, her eyes dart from side to side, and confusion sets in.

After the episode, which can last a few minutes, Derr said she feels like she is reprogramming, much as a computer would update, and has to refresh herself and realize where she is and what happened. She doesn't remember the episode.

After she bumped a guardrail with her car during a seizure, Derr and her doctor agreed to no longer allow her to drive, and after cutting back her hours at work and even working from home as a research analyst for Comcast Spotlight, she eventually had to quit and go on permanent disability.

Prior to her new Neuropace device, Derr was an avid adventurist and karate master -- she obtained her third-degree black belt -- and would wake up at the same time as her husband would for work just to feel like she wasn't sleeping her day away and not being proactive.

In fact, her husband would run to Dunkin Donuts, a little more than five minutes from their house, to get her a coffee each morning since she could not drive.

Just over a month ago, Derr was able to get her driver's license back and has even started working for LuLaRoe, a women's clothing company, from home.

Derr still wakes up each morning to start her day early, but now she gets to work, walks the dogs, works around the house and attends church.

Her husband, Corey, whom she met in college and married in 2009, has been an excellent caregiver, Derr said, and has been going to crossfit classes with her a few times a week.

"(The surgery) was a light at the end of the tunnel," Derr said as she sat beside her three Pugs at home.

Derr, who has an identical twin sister who does not have any health issues, was also diagnosed with lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph nodes, just six months after her epilepsy diagnosis in 2005.

She went through six months of chemotherapy and has since been in remission, but she is quick to say that her diagnosis of epilepsy was harder than the cancer diagnosis.

"Cancer didn't take away my job and driver's license. Epilepsy did," she said.

Her friends now say she has a "spark" to her and Derr, with a smile on her face, couldn't agree more.

Although technically epilepsy cannot be "cured," having surgery and removing a part of the brain that is affected will result in a "qualitatively improved life" where medication may no longer be required for seizures, according to Politsky.

The simple rule is that anyone with a brain can have a seizure, Politsky said, and one out of 26 people will at some point in their life develop epilepsy.

Seizures can occur at any age, but health conditions, birth defects, age and race may make developing epilepsy more likely.

For more information about epilepsy or to raise epilepsy awareness, visit www.epilepsy.com.

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Lori Comstock can also be reached on Twitter: @LoriComstockNJH or by phone: 973-383-1194.