Absence Seizures Won’t Keep Andrea from Becoming a Full-Time Musician

Andrea is living with absence seizures but that doesn’t stop her from performing beautiful music with her band Motion Device. In fact, the group has recently released a beautiful piano cover of Boston’s “More Than A Feeling.”

Andrea’s story

Andrea has learned to cope with epilepsy and not let it get in the way of her aspirations to be a full-time musician. When people see Andrea in a Youtube video or live on stage with her rock band Motion Device, for the most part they see one thing – a musician.

Motion Device is an independent hard rock band from Canada led by vocalist Sara Menoudakis, along with Josh Marrocco on guitar, Andrea Menoudakis on bass/keys and David Menoudakis on drums. They just released their fourth studio album titled ‘Motion Device IV’. The album was recorded, produced, mixed and mastered by the band in their own fan-funded recording studio. With over 100,000 social media fans and more than 20 million views on their channel, they’re quickly becoming one of the brightest up and coming bands in North America.

Diagnosed with epilepsy

At the age of seven, Andrea’s parents noticed she started having short staring spells. She would stop whatever she was doing for a second or two and then continue where she left off as if nothing happened. The staring spells began to occur more frequently and last longer than a few seconds as she grew older so the time came to seek out a medical opinion. After seeing her doctor, a few specialists and getting some tests done, she was diagnosed with epilepsy. The doctors told the family Andrea had been having absence seizures.

Although the seizures seemed to disrupt Andrea’s life more often as the years passed by, she still managed to lead a normal life. Her family decided to try and avoid prescribed medication for some time and tried to treat her holistically but nothing really helped. However after a couple grand mal seizures her parents decided to again seek out medical treatment. Andrea was prescribed an antiepileptic drug by an epilepsy specialist and she’s been taking it ever since. It’s the only medication she takes and it seem to have helped keep the grand mal seizures under control and minimize her petit mal seizures as well – but she still has ‘daydreams’ as she calls them a few times a day. In fact, she composed a song on piano about epilepsy called ‘Daydream’ when she was sixteen.

It’s safe to say Andrea feels most comfortable with an instrument at her finger tips but there’s a lot more to her than meets the eye. After she finished high school with honours she immediately began working full-time as an instructor in an after-school tutoring program. Besides teaching, keeping busy with her music and playing in a rock band and of course Andrea has epilepsy.