Russell & Christine, Canada

On the morning of January 30, 2003, Christine Lowe had a seizure in bed. Hours later on the couch, she suddenly shouted "It's happening again!" and went into another. As fate would have it, my friend David was present, and we also had a 8mm video camera sitting on the tripod nearby.

Christine had left standing instructions to catch a seizure on video if I could, so I quickly removed the camera from the tripod, flipped up the standby switch, pressed the record button, and instructed David NOT to zoom in because the old camera's auto focus was shot. We caught 45 minutes of footage that day, most of it consisting of Christine flailing about the apartment in a panic, yammering utter nonsense. In 2007, David mentioned a new thing on the internet called Youtube, explaining that it had all this great footage of bands from the 60's and so on. We explored it, and found that all the footage for "epilepsy" and "seizure" consisted of kids pretending to have seizures for a laugh, TV shows with flicker that might cause seizures, or grainy hospital surveillance footage that didn't really show anything. With our footage being so clear, we figured it might be a good idea to upload it. We added text captions to the footage to explain Christine's incredible recovery using marijuana to treat her condition so people would know about the benefits of marijuana. These captions proved to be a bit distracting, as commenters pointed out, so we put up the second video days later, which consists of a short intro from Christine, and then the raw footage of the event. We sent out a press release, and in under 30 minutes I got a call from the Ottawa Sun. They did a story and Christine was stopped several times in public by people who had seen the article. The Guardian in the UK did a story about how these videos were disturbing and insulting to epileptics, and even used a still from our video for an illustration. CLICK HERE TO READ IT I wrote this OP-ED as a reply: CLICK HERE TO READ IT In August of 2010, an article was published in the Ottawa Citizen to mark over 1 million views of our footage. That was the original clip, with the text. It was taken down by Youtube a few months later because someone complained about the marijuana references. But not before getting over 1.2 million hits. The second clip remains, still getting about 1000 hits per day. This video has saved lives. It has been used on the TV show The Doctors, on a morning magazine show in Japan, and in numerous schools, hospitals, and jails.