By Carl Weiser
Enquirer Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - Fourteen-year-old Bianca Larkins had just stepped out of the Pleasant Ridge pool this past summer when she had an epileptic seizure.

"I had convulsions, jerking," Larkins said. She was unconscious for a minute. But she considers herself lucky.

If she had been in the water, "I probably would have drowned," she said.

Larkins, an eighth-grader at Walnut Hills High School, was one of 40 children with epilepsy from around the country who spent Tuesday at the U.S. Capitol lobbying their hometown congressional delegations for more spending on epilepsy research and education.

Larkins' lobbying trip came just a month after a friend and Elder High School sophomore, Dennis Stemler, died of an epileptic seizure at home.

The two attended an epilepsy support group together. Larkins said she was devastated by Stemler's death.

"We're all one head injury away from having epilepsy ourselves," Margie Frommeyer told Neil Ruddock, an aide to Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio.

Frommeyer, executive director of the Epilepsy Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, was asking Congress to sign a letter urging that CDC's financing for epilepsy research and education be raised from $8.2 million to $13.2 million, and that a separate program at the National Institutes of Health get a boost from $3 million to $4.5 million.

Ruddock said he would pass along the request.

Larkins said the money will help find better medications, identify the still-mysterious cause of the disease, and help other people learn what to do when someone has an epileptic seizure. (Don't hold a person down, clear the area of anything sharp, and turn the person on his or her side, advises the Epilepsy Foundation.)

Larkins, the daughter of John and Barbara Larkins of Kennedy Heights, was accompanied by her mother, a sales associate at Lazarus. She recalled her daughter's seizures started a few years ago as eye twitching, then jerking, then full-fledged seizures in which her daughter would become "dead weight."

"It's very frightening," Barbara Larkins said. At one point, Bianca was having seizures several times a month, often in her sleep. She would stiffen and fall out of bed.

"You can't feel anything," Bianca Larkins said. She can't stand up for a few minutes after a seizure. It's now been almost a year since her last one, and she is no longer taking medication.

Medications, which control but don't necessarily prevent all seizures, can cost hundreds of dollars a month, said Sylvia Blair, a spokeswoman from the national Epilepsy Foundation.

Epilepsy tends to affect the old and the young. As people live longer, more and more people are getting epilepsy.

"You could wake up one morning with seizures," she said.

About epilepsyEpilepsy is a neurological disorder that causes seizures.

It can strike at any age.

An estimated 2.3 million Americans suffer from it. That includes about 350,000 kids.

On the Web

www.epilepsyfoundation.org, the Epilepsy Foundation

www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/epilepsy, Centers for Disease Control information

http://health.nih.gov/result.asp/240, National Institutes of Health information

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

Enquirer research