New publication about PNES
In 2015, Kate Berger published a remarkable and influential work, View from the Floor: Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures: A Patient’s Perspective. Her candid, unfiltered account—marked by raw honesty, sharp wit, sarcasm, humor, and resilience—offered a powerful perspective that continues to resonate deeply with individuals living with PNES and those who care for them.
Ten years later, in 2025, Berger has once again delivered an exceptional contribution with her new essay collection, All The Days In Between. I read the entire book in one sitting during a flight, flipping through one essay after another, chuckling, nodding, deeply touched and impressed. The essays are unflinchingly authentic, blending humor, sorrow, and hope in a way that feels both intimate and universal. Kate has finally achieved seizure freedom but these powerful essays are about everything that came before that.
This work holds significant value not only for the PNES community but also for healthcare professionals—psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, and others. Reading this book will give them a richer understanding of what it means to live with PNES, going well beyond any clinical text.
Personally, I hope we will not have to wait another decade to have the pleasure of reading Berger’s new works.
This is the description you will find on Amazon: With humor, candor, and the sharpness of someone who’s lived through it, Kate writes about the treatments that failed her, the therapist she fired, the relationship that endured, and the ordinary, beautiful life she built in the shadow of illness. These pages aren’t instructions on how to get better—they’re a map for how to live when “better” might never come.
Raw, funny, and full of fight, All The Days In Between is a book for anyone living a hard story with an uncertain ending.
Kate Berger is an invited guest to our PNES and for this entry she chose to share of the following from her book:
Excerpt from All the Days in between
PILLS I LOVE
There are two types of doctors: those who won’t prescribe you medicine because they think you’re drug seeking, and those who prescribe you every drug under the sun because they don’t know what else to do.
I had countless doctors, countless scripts and, after eleven years, one hell of a medicine cabinet.
There were drugs that made me nauseous and drugs that made me itch. Drugs that gave me headaches and drugs that made me hallucinate (that was a weird night). The doctors prescribed me a lot of drugs I hated and a few drugs I really, really liked.
Her name was Tramadol, and she was an opiate.
I developed migraines in elementary school, so by the time I got to high school, the occasional blinding headache was nothing to write home about. But when seizures came into my life, the game changed.
The constant whiplash exacerbated these headaches, and after years of white-knuckling through an ever-increasing number of migraines, I’d become a college kid desperate for relief.
I went to a headache specialist, and he thought over-the-counter painkillers were exacerbating the headaches; trapping me in this cycle of pain. His fix? Use Tramadol instead.
He wrote the prescription, and I followed orders.
When a headache began, I took Tramadol and crossed my fingers, hoping it might stop the headache from growing into a migraine.
It worked. The migraine didn’t hit.
I was elated to finally be free from the migraine pain and pleasantly surprised this new plan worked. On days when I didn’t have migraines, the world just looked…brighter.
I needed more of these days.
So, each morning as I got ready to leave for class, I made a point to check in with myself.
Did I have a little headache?
Lo-and-behold, I usually did have a little ache going on! Sometimes it hurt a lot and sometimes, just a little, but I couldn’t risk the ache growing into a migraine. I panicked at the thought of a migraine finding its way into my day, so if there was even a tiny twinge, I took a pill.
Better safe than sorry.
Then I got smarter. Why should I wait for the pain to start in the first place? I could take the medicine before pain ever showed up and circumvent this whole situation! So, I woke up each day, drank my green tea and popped a Tramadol. It was the perfect prep for class, and a surefire way to guarantee I had a headache-free day.
You know, one of those nice days when I was pain-free and felt so good.
The colors in the sky were a little…brighter on those days. Inside, I had this warm, happy little glow.
I was calm.
I was content.
I was out of pain.
I was high.
I was 20 years old and addicted to opioids.