Klauk On Seizures: "In a way I was lucky."

PGA Tour pro and son of longtime TPC Sawgrass superintendent Jeff Klauk with a revealing and emotional contribution to this week's SI Golf Plus about his grand mal seizures. He's got a remarkably optmistic tone considering how health problems have sidetracked his promising career.

In a grand mal the muscles suddenly tense—sometimes so forcefully that people moan or scream as the air is shot from their lungs—then contract and expand quickly and repeatedly, causing convulsions. These convulsions can be violent, and mine were. It was two weeks before I felt like myself again, with no memory loss, no sore jaw, no aching muscles.

Two months later I awoke in a hospital in Scranton, Pa., after another grand mal. Though my illness wasn't diagnosed as such at the time, I was one of the almost three million Americans with epilepsy—a neurological disorder resulting from surges of electrical signals inside the brain.

These episodes were shocking, both physically and emotionally. We had no family history of seizures and I had shown no previous signs of a problem. My doctors put me on Trileptal, which kept the seizures at bay for four years. During that time I continued to play well, finishing third on the Nationwide money list in 2008 to earn my PGA Tour card and turning in a rookie season that included three top 10 finishes and more than $1.2 million in earnings.