Everyone knows I don’t drive. When I started having seizures in October 2017, I got three separate notices from the DMV that my license had been suspended. Ivan and I figured out that each time I went to the ER for uncontrolled seizures, the attending doctor was filing a legal report but forgetting to document it on my medical record. We, however, got the message loud and clear: No driving under any circumstances. 

This wasn’t the earth-shattering blow that you might assume. I actually hadn’t been in the driver’s seat since my accident in December 2016. During my early recovery, just riding in a car was a huge source of anxiety for me. We’re not completely sure why, since I was hit by a car rather than being a traditional car accident victim, but our best guess is that some part of my injured brain identified cars themselves as “unsafe.”  

By God’s grace (and a lot of patience from my family) I was able to overcome this general fear of cars after a few months. However, my brain and body were not nearly recovered enough for any of us to consider me taking the wheel again. By the time I started having seizures in October 2017, I was approaching a much better place mentally and physically, but still not what any of us would have considered “road-ready.” 

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know that from 2017-2023, I fought a debilitating battle with a seizure disorder that perplexed specialists and kept me housebound for most of that time. You can check out these blog posts (Status Epilepticus, “They turned me into a Newt!” Life after Stanford) for a little review. Our recent memoir, Walking with Grace, explores this phase in our journey, gives context on our lives leading up to my accident, and digs into the spiritual lessons God was teaching us during those years afterwards when he was asking us to walk by faith and not by sight. 

In October 2023, I was blessed to be miraculously healed from my seizures after years of trying all the medical cures available and resigning myself to a lifetime of living with a severe disability. (Check out this video to watch me share my testimony live!)

After it became clear that my seizures were gone for good, Ivan gently raised the driving question with me. How did I feel about getting on the road again? I immediately rattled off all the reasons why it wasn’t a good idea: 

• I would need a doctor to “unsuspend” the license, and the process might be convoluted since so many doctors had suspended it in the first place
• Even if I’m no longer having seizures, I’m still a brain injury patient, and doctors have expressed doubts about my reflexes and vision
• I’d be effectively steering one-handed, since I can’t feel my left hand

Ivan took my objections well and said he wouldn’t force me to do anything that made me uncomfortable. Deep down, I knew that while there was some truth in what I’d said, the real reason I didn’t want to drive was that I was terrified. I couldn’t bear the responsibility of being behind the wheel of a car again – especially of what might happen to someone else if I made a mistake.

God has been setting me free from a lot of fears recently. Lord-willing, I will post more on this soon, but for now I want to share that a few days ago God convicted me that if he’s graciously healed me from seizures, then he doesn’t want me to live enslaved by my fear of driving. Last night I asked Ivan to take me to a nearby parking lot to learn the truth about where I landed on the vision/steering spectrum.

The first few seconds in the driver’s seat were a bit surreal. I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car in eight years, and our white Hyundai Accent is a completely different feel from the little red Mazda 2 I was driving at the time of my accident. (For example, the Hyndai has power locks, which is a big upgrade from my Mazda. 😊) However, after pulling the seat up and the rearview mirror down – Ivan is a good three inches taller than me – everything else came back relatively automatically. The rhythm of checking my mirrors and shifting from gas to brake and back again flowed surprising smoothly. 

The only major change – and one that will probably take practice to master – is pulling into and out of parking spaces. Since I can’t feel my left hand, it was noticeably harder for me to calculate how much or little to turn the wheel. For a healthy person, your brain sends a command to your hand, gets feedback from your nerve receptors based on what your hand “feels” in response, and then adjusts its command accordingly. For me, my brain is sending the command to turn the wheel, but it’s not getting any feedback from my left hand about whether the wheel is actually turning, or if it is turning, how much or little it needs to be adjusted. 

This parking challenge isn’t something I can’t overcome. It just means that I’ll probably have to practice parking many, many times and train my brain to look for other markers besides feel (probably visual markers), to decide when or how much to adjust the steering wheel.

Interestingly enough, my left hand wasn’t an issue for driving in a straight line, or even backing up or turning, because in those situations it functioned more like a passive counterbalance for the right hand (which I can feel) rather than needing to become an active participant. 

As for testing my reflexes in traffic, there’s no way to do that without getting on the road. But from what Ivan and I saw last night, we would feel comfortable asking my doctor to consider reinstating my license. I’ve far exceeded the written California state requirement of going 3-6 months without a seizure. Although I ultimately can’t control the legal ramifications of my future, and realize that my doctor may still have concerns since I had seizures for so many years, I wanted to share this milestone with you because this time last year I never dreamed I’d be healthy enough to consider getting behind the wheel of a car. Even this time last week, I never dreamed God would have set me free from my anxiety over causing an accident, or discovering that I was truly incapable of driving, or both. We truly serve an amazing God!