Posted by Dr. Michael Wald
How and why can a 45 -year old man, in top physical condition…a renowned doctor of nutrition and marathon runner, fall victim to an excruciating kidney stone? Well, I am sure that I know how it happened – how a tiny 2 milimeter kidney stone kept me on my back for days!
I just got over an excruciating kidney stone attack.
It was just a few weeks after I completed running the New York City Marathon (time: 3 hrs, 48 minutes) when I was accompanying my daughter to her place of work in Mount Kisco. I sat down in the car and within just a few minutes I had a strong urgency to urinate – unlike any urge I had every experienced. I asked my daughter to “step on it” and her reply was, “sorry dad, I can’t speed”, so I quietly bit my lip. After 3-4 minutes we finally arrived at her place of work; I took the drivers seat and sped to my office just a block away.
The word epilepsy derives from the Greek word epilepsia, which means “to take hold of” or “to seize.” Epilepsy is not a disease in itself, but rather a symptom of disease. The epilepsies are a group of disorders characterized by sudden, recurrent, and episodic changes in neurologic function caused by abnormalities in the electrical activity of the brain. Each episode of neurologic dysfunction is called a seizure. Seizures are termed convulsive when accompanied by motor manifestations or nonconvulsive when accompanied by sensory, cognitive, or emotional events. Epilepsy can occur due to a number of abnormalities such as neurologic injuries, structural brain lesions, or some systemic diseases. Epilepsy is termed idiopathic when there is neither a history of neurologic insult nor other apparent neurologic dysfunction. Whatever the etiology, the common denominator in all these conditions is the epileptic attack or seizure. 
Even with an injury I completed my 2nd marathon –the New York City Marathon on behalf of the Tourette’s Syndrome Association of America raising money to help children and adults with this challenging malady. Tourette’s Syndrome is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by multiple physical (motor) tic and at least one vocal (phonic) tic; these tics characteristically wax and wane. Tourette’s is defined as part of a spectrum of tic, which includes transient and chronic tics. People with Tourette’s are most often very creative with the actual advantage of having a nervous system that processes certain types of information up to twice as fast as the rest of us without this condition. We all have unique characteristics; only if we learn to become aware of and embrace our special qualities can we develop into fully actualized human beings. To run a marathon, I began by taking notice of my level of physical and mental conditioning and capitalized on this developing an entirely new mental and physical resiliency; not unlike those with Tourette’s Syndrome might do.