When I suffered my first seizure while asleep, I didn't know what had happened. I only knew that I felt as if I'd been run over by a Mack truck. It wasn't until later, after my quality of life had deteriorated precipitously, that I finally received a diagnosis: nocturnal epileptic seizures. They were life-threatening-and uncontrollable, even with medication. Brain surgery offered me a way out. But after surgeons at Seattle's Harborview Hospital removed my right temporal lobe and "tailored" a portion of my hippocampus, I awoke to a disorienting world in which my own face was no longer...