CURE: Citizens United For Research In Epilepsy.

Two days after my thirty-ninth birthday, I wound up strapped down in an ambulance because a passer-by saw me having a grand mal seizure on my lawn. I had never had one before, but have had too many since.

I'm just one of three million Americans living with epilepsy. Presidential advisor David Axelrod and his wife Susan will be featured on 60 Minutes Sunday to discuss their daughter's struggle with seizures, and they are the founders of CURE--Citizens United for Research In Epilepsy. Click here to donate.

Many of us don't know why we have epilepsy, but all of us hope for a cure.

Please watch 60 Minutes Sunday and learn a little more about the underfunded fight to find that cure.

From HuffPo:

Most Americans know David Axelrod as a senior political adviser to President Obama. But this Sunday, David and his wife Susan will join Katie Couric on CBS's 60 Minutes to discuss his other role -- as concerned parents of a daughter with epilepsy.

"At first we thought it would be a passing thing; we never realized these seizures would define her whole life," David Axelrod has said.

They aren't alone.

Epilepsy impacts up to three million Americans of all ages; more than multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, and Parkinson's disease combined. Federal and private dollars invested in epilepsy research pale in comparison to those spent on other diseases.

"Every day 500 people are diagnosed with epilepsy and doctors don't know what caused it for more than 300 of them," according to Susan Axelrod. In 1998, the Axelrods and other parents of epileptic children decided to do something to help the staggering number of Americans who live with this disease. They founded Citizens United for Researching Epilepsy, or CURE, which has since raised over $10 million to fund over 90 cutting edge research projects into cures for epilepsy.

The 60 Minutes episode will also feature CURE's scientific adviser, Harvard researcher Dr. Frances Jensen, and Captain Pat Horan, who has struggled with epilepsy after a traumatic brain injury incurred in 2007 on the battlefield in Iraq.

Susan Axelrod hopes that the CBS segment, along with CURE's new Every Dollar Counts, Every Seizure Matters campaign, will bring new fervor to finding a cure for this disease. Axelrod discusses the new campaign and the 60 Minutes episode on her personal blog for CURE.

The campaign hopes to raise $250,000 by the end of the year to fund a new research award. Meanwhile, friends and supporters of CURE are already organizing viewing parties for the Sunday segment.

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"There Are 8 Million Stories In The Naked City."

     This post's title is taken from the first half of the closing line in 1948's The Naked City.

    I have always loved reading newspaper columns. The 750-word form has long transfixed me, ever since I first read Jimmy Breslin in the New York Daily News in the 1970's. Breslin seemed to be writing for an audience of one--The Man in the Street--and his columns read like short, short stories.  They were stuffed with sharp detail; real locales, hustlers and hookers, politicians and policemen, and Breslin never wasted a word. 

     We are lucky in Los Angeles to have Times columnist Steve Lopez, one of the finest at his craft. I tracked down a reprint of a column he wrote about Wal-Mart in late 2003 after the Times had done a three-part series on the retail behemoth. Lopez wrote about the real cost of that $8.63 polo shirt and you can read that column here. 

     I mention all this due to Sunday's 60 Minutes segment concerning Lopez's relationship with Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless Los Angeles man. I have read Lopez's columns on Nathaniel, who is a musically gifted paranoid schizophrenic and now the writer's friend.  The columns brim with honesty, respect, humanity and empathy, and are emblematic of a storyteller of the first degree.

     If you missed 60 Minutes this week, here's the segment.

     Those millions of stories in the Naked City?

    This is one of them: