With a heritage from military service dating past the American Revolution, Tim was upbrought with the belief of service to others.  Even before entering school, he knew he wanted a career in the Navy.  Even though a head trauma at the age of two started minor complex partial seizures teachers would later excuse as “daydreaming”, and his Congressman was ready to nominate him to the Naval Academy, the first time he felt the wretched grip epilepsy could impose was when the Navy—and the other armed forces—denied him the chance to serve.

While I could do most anything my peers were doing—and I even was a counselor at a summer camp for the mentally-impaired—it aggravated me when someone did tell me “No” because of my epilepsy.  As I studied myself for exact triggers of my seizures, the risk of having seizures was a part of every major decision of my life; not just jobs, marriage, or fatherhood, but as trivial as when eating a hamburger with onions!

Politics and government seemed to be the young man’s alternative, except when the rate of seizures escalated in and caused him to have devastating car accidents, in which no one was hurt, fortunately.  An idea that came to him was to return to college and learn television and journalism.  It seemed perfect for his creative mind.  But once again, epilepsy beat him out of several job opportunities in Los Angeles, and although he excelled as a TV news producer, his inability to drive limited his career.

Another service window opened when he was offered a chance to teach at a graduate school in Mainland China.  He felt that he had found himself when students remarked that his jocularity and respect for them was not at all like the rhetoric had them expecting Americans would be like.  On occasions when he had seizures in class, his students asked him to explain epilepsy.  It didn’t frighten them, but concerned officials enough that he had to move to other cities to teach.  He took that as a blessing, not just to see more of the country, but to enlighten more people about epilepsy and to answer their questions about his Christian faith.

Tim returned to the US with a wife, and it surprised him Metro-Atlanta lacked any support groups at the time.  He started one which quickly became popular.  The longer he led it, the more it aggravated him how many people didn’t research how to live with their particular types of seizures (there are over 40!), so many felt depressed and lonely.  He turned to his TV skills to start The Epilepsy Gangster, a podcast featuring people living happy, productive, and socially-active lives despite their epilepsy.

He was nominated for the “Creative Contributor” category of the 2024 Social Health Awards.  He wrote a book about finding his faith and discovering the purpose in being epileptic while in China, entitled  Involuntary Mission, In China with a Thorn in the Flesh, and he is a contributing writer to EpilepsyDisease.com.