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Ed Yeates ReportingA Utah woman who couldn't stop laughing is cured! We first reported on Rebecca Laws more than two years ago as she searched for a way to end this rare form of a seizure.
For Rebecca Laws, laughing in the absence of anything funny would come on without warning, sometimes as much as twenty times a day. For most of us, laughing is a natural human emotion - and appropriate. But Rebecca Laws would do it frequently and at the most inappropriate times.
At St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix, Doctors monitored the events. She starts smiling. The head turns to one side. The laughing begins. They're called Gelastic seizures, the name stemming from the Greek word - laughter. But that was then.
Rebecca Laws: "I don't have to worry about what's going to happen next. Am I going to have a seizure? Am I going to remember? Am I going to get hurt? It's a whole new scenario."
Rebecca's life has changed dramatically. She rides a bicycle with her husband Scott and is getting her drivers license, things she could never do before. In addition to a Masters Degree, she went back to school and is now certified in medical transcription.
Scott Laws: "She's more able to remember and to connect events now."
Rebecca Laws: "I haven't had anything close to a seizure since the 19th of November."
That's when surgeons at the Barrows Neurological Institute drilled a little hole in the top of her head and removed a small benign tumor near her hypothalamus. Like a Dr. House mystery, this was a tumor nobody knew was there.
So after all these years, the laughing seizures have ended. And her memory..
Rebecca Laws: "I had to work extra hard to remember things that a typical person would not have a problem with. And now that isn't even an issue."
After all she's been through, this cure was such a simple procedure, one Rebecca laughingly says has now turned her life upside down, but strangely right side up.
