My Epilepsy Battle How Life Has Changed For Kath Bier

The Breeze Radio host tells how she stays grounded.

- Amy Prebble

On the day before she was due to run the 2014 Dunedin Half Marathon, bubbly radio presenter Kath Bier fell to the ground and started shaking. She was aware of her surroundings but couldn’t get out of the state she was in.

“I thought I was losing my mind,” she recalls. “All morning I knew something wasn’t quite right and all of a sudden I could feel a sense that something big was going to happen. In the back of my mind, after it all had happened, I was able to grasp on to the knowledge that my sister had been diagnosed with epilepsy when she was 29. But when it was all happening to me that just didn’t occur to me.”

Kath’s seizures kept coming so she was taken to hospital for tests, including being assessed at the psychiatric unit, but a definitive diagnosis wasn’t reached. Despite this, she still completed the run the next day.

“I wanted to finish that and then I was going to deal with what was happening to me,” she says. “Halfway through, I had what I now know was a seizure and my friend Nikki was just amazing. She picked me up and dusted me off. She knew that if I couldn’t complete it, it would actually be quite devastating for me.”

Back home in Wellington, a neurologist confirmed Kath (43) has temporal lobe epilepsy and that life was about to change somewhat for her, husband Mark (43), and her children Jesse (13) and Gus (10).