How a near-death experience at age five became the foundation of everything I’ve built
There is a moment in my life that I return to often.
Not because it was the worst moment — though by any measure, it was close. I return to it because of what it quietly set in motion. Because of the extraordinary chain of events, it started. And because of what it eventually taught me about purpose, resilience, and the hidden gift inside our most devastating experiences.
I was five years old. And I was dying.
When Life Changes in a Single Night
My early childhood was idyllic in the way that only early childhood can be — weekend trips with my parents, afternoons playing with friends, evenings listening to my grandmother’s stories about the golden days. I was wrapped in the kind of warmth that makes the world feel safe and infinite.
Then came an ordinary ear infection. Ten days of penicillin. Bedrest. Nothing unusual. Nothing alarming.
On the tenth night, my mother noticed my lips looked redder than normal. She went to bed uneasy — that quiet, unexplainable unease that only mothers seem to feel. And at dawn the next morning, she woke to a sound no parent should ever hear.
She found me on the floor of my bedroom, turning blue, caught in my first grand mal seizure. My eyes had rolled back. My body was convulsing. Foam at my mouth. My skin was losing color as my body fought desperately for oxygen.
She dialed for an ambulance. And in a matter of minutes, our lives changed completely.
The Diagnosis That Shook Everything
At the hospital, after tests and consultations and the kind of grave-faced deliberation that tells you something is very wrong, the doctors arrived at their conclusion.
Encephalitis. A virus, carried to my brain by the bacteria from my ear infection, had taken hold and was spreading. The prognosis was devastating in its directness.
If she survives, she will likely have severe brain damage. She may never walk again.
I was placed in a medically induced coma. My parents kept vigil beside my bed — hour after hour, day after day — for four days that must have felt like four lifetimes.
The Prayer. The Miracle. The Teardrop.
On the fourth day, my father did the only thing he had left to do.
He is a man of deep and unshakeable faith. He closed his eyes and pictured the statue outside his childhood church in Greece — a statue said to weep in times of divine intervention. He poured every ounce of love he possessed into that prayer. He begged. He bargained. He surrendered completely to something greater than himself.
And when he opened his eyes, a single teardrop was rolling slowly down my face.
Moments later, I woke from the coma.
When the doctors ran their tests again, they found no significant brain damage. They had no medical explanation for what had happened. My father, quietly and completely, needed none.
But the encephalitis had left its mark. Scar tissue had formed deep in my brain. And with it came a diagnosis that would shape the next fifteen years of my life.
Epilepsy.
The Gift That Didn’t Feel Like One
What followed was not a triumphant recovery story. It was the slow, unglamorous, often heartbreaking work of learning to live inside a body that didn’t always cooperate — and a world that didn’t always understand.
There were seizures in school hallways and college classrooms. It was the extraordinary milestone of earning my driver’s license at eighteen — that sacred symbol of independence and freedom — and then losing it again after a seizure behind the wheel. It was becoming dependent on the schedules and kindness of others just to leave my own home.
It was a profound isolation. A quiet, persistent wondering: Is this all my life is going to be?
For years, I carried that question like a weight. And for years, I had no answer.
The Discovery That Changed Everything
After more than a decade of searching — of medications and side effects and the slow erosion of hope that comes from trying everything and finding nothing that fully works — I discovered something that would transform my life in ways I could not have imagined.
Natural remedies. Herbal medicine. Ancient wisdom about the body’s capacity to heal itself that modern medicine had largely set aside.
I threw myself into research with the same determination I had always brought to simply getting through each day. Two years of studying, experimenting, and implementing. And slowly — so slowly it felt almost impossible — my seizures began to diminish.
After fifteen years, they stopped completely.
I got my driver’s license back.
And something shifted inside me that had been waiting, quietly and patiently, for exactly this moment.
When Pain Becomes Purpose
I started writing. Then speaking. Then podcasting. I began sharing my story — not the polished, edited version, but the real one — and something I had not expected began to happen.
People wrote back.
Thousands of letters, messages, and notes from people I had never met, in places I had never been. People who had felt the same invisible weight. People who had wondered the same desperate question in the quiet hours of their own difficult nights. People who had found in my words something that made them feel, perhaps for the first time, that they were not alone.
One letter stopped me completely.
A stranger wrote to tell me that my book had saved their life. That they had been standing at the very edge. That something in my story had reached them in that darkness and pulled them back.
I sat with that letter for a long time. And I understood — with a clarity I had never felt before — that the teardrop on my face at age five was not just the moment I survived.
It was the moment my mission began.
What I Know Now That I Wish I Had Known Then
Today, my podcast reaches 1.3 million listeners. I have written twenty bestselling books. I have appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. I have stood before Congress to advocate for those living with epilepsy. I have won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.
None of it happened despite my epilepsy.
All of it happened because of it.
And this is the truth that took me the longest to fully embrace — the one I want to offer you now, wherever you are in your own story:
The experiences that break us open are almost never the end of the story. They are, more often than we can see in the middle of them, the beginning of the most important chapter.
The wound becomes the wisdom. The struggle becomes the strength. The thing that tried to silence you becomes, if you let it, the very source of your most powerful voice.
The Question I Want to Leave You With
Whatever you are carrying right now — whatever feels too heavy, too permanent, too unfair — I want to ask you something.
What if it isn’t happening to you?
What if it is happening to you?
Not in a way that dismisses the pain or minimizes the loss. But in a way that holds open the possibility that there is something being built inside you through this experience — a depth of understanding, a capacity for compassion, a strength of purpose — that could not have been built any other way.
I know it is easy to say this from the other side. I know it is harder to believe when you are in the middle of the hardest thing you have ever faced.
But I also know this — because I have lived it, and because thousands of people have written to tell me they have lived it too:
The people who have been through the most often have the most to give.
Your story matters. Your voice matters. The world is waiting for exactly what only you can offer — the wisdom that comes from having walked through something hard and chosen, against all odds, to keep going.
That is not a small thing.
That is everything.
This is Part 1 of a 5-part series: From Seizures to Success — How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher. Part 2 will publish next week.
About the Author
Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media™. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast, The Advisor with Stacey Chillemi, reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.