Bollywood actor Fatima Sana Shaikh, who got her first big break with Dangal (2016), has time and again opened up about her battle with epilepsy to help raise awareness of the neurological condition. A few months ago, Fatima’s Gustaakh Ishq co-star Vijay Varma also revealed that she suffered an epileptic seizure on set and how the team took care of her, thanks to all the instructions given by Fatima in advance. Well, in a new chat with Soha Ali Khan on her podcast All About Her, Fatima remembered the first time she suffered from a seizure, being diagnosed with epilepsy during the shoot of Dangal, and how medication affected her during the filming.
During the podcast, Fatima Sana Shaikh shared, “I was training. And usse pehele ek do baar aaya tha bachpan mein but…” Neurologist Dr Jayanti Mani, who was also a guest on the podcast, chimed in to explain that seizures, or episodes, can look different each time, so much so that most times people don’t recognise that it was a seizure. Remembering her earliest memory of a seizure, Fatima shared, “I have no memory. I just remember feeling a lot of fear and passing out and ending up in the hospital. And one of the times it had happened was when I was in a dance class. I was dancing and I passed out, I was getting a seizure, one of the girls kept her hand (in Fatima’s mouth), then I bit her, because, bolte hain naa ‘chamach daalo, yeh daalo’, toh bechari ne apna haath daal diya pagal jaise. Toh I bit on her, apparently, and she was bleeding, and God knows what happened with her. They took me to the hospital and I woke up in a hospital. So I was in a dance class, no memory, and I’m here and 10 people are looking at me from the top. I was disoriented, I don’t see familiar faces, I don’t know where I am, and why am I here. I started crying. And later on the doctor said, I don’t know why he said that, ‘Oh, this is for attention.’ They told my parents. ‘And maybe kuchh drug use hoga’. The doctor said. He was also unaware.”
Fatima revealed she got tests done to prove that she was not under any influence. But it was a traumatic experience because she was just 15 years old. Sharing her memories from the Dangal set, Fatima shared, “And then I was training. Woh time pe kya hota tha naa, mujhe auras aate the. Par mujhe nahi maalum tha ki auras kya hote hain. So basically, there is like this light that is just hovering here on this side, largely like it’s always on the right side. And dheere dheere badti jaati hai, badti jaati hai, badti jaati hai, and it just takes over. So now there is fear, that this thing is there, kab yeh mujhe leke jaayega and I’m out of it, I have no idea. Sometimes its there and it goes away. So in Dangal, few times this happened jahan mujhe aaya aura and then it passed. And while you were shooting and I was training, and it came, and I was like ‘Nahi, nahi, kuchh nahi, ho jaayega’. And then badhta gaya, badhta gaya. Jo bhi mer aas paas tha maine bola mujher seizure aane waala hai. Kisi ko pata hi nahi kya hai. Mujhe bhi nahi pata kya hai. And luckily Aamir (Khan) tha aur Sanya (Malhotra) thi, Kripa Shankar Bishnoi jo humein train kar rahe the, woh the… and futafut Google kiya, unko answers mile, unn logo ne side pe rakha, jo bhi hua. And then eventually I think as a production house, they took it upon themselves ki we have to figure out what this is because a lot was riding on me, the whole film.”
Fatima revealed, “They took me to a doctor, they did all the MRIs, they did EEG, sab kuchh, they took me to a certain doctor, neurologist in Bombay at that time, he put me on medication. It was a medication that was just too much for me. Aisa lagta tha that I’m under the influence. So I couldn’t walk straight, everything was wonky, I was feeling very depressive and angry, I was all the time very angry, and sad, I felt very alienated. Then I stopped taking medication. So I started medication, I was feeling all of this and I was like ‘I can’t function, I have to wrestle’. And then I decided ki nahi, main nahi lungi. Kisi ko bina bataye maine chhod diya. Because chhoda, I would get a seizure. But I was so scared that anybody would see me getting a seizure, that whenever I would get auras I would go to the bathroom, I would lock myself, I would put myself on the side, hoping that it comes and it goes and nobody would come to know. But eventually it went on for good 4 years.”
On the work front, Fatima will reportedly be seen in Nyaya next. The courtroom drama series, directed by Karan Kapadia and Nitya Mehra, is also rumoured to star Saiyaara fame Aneet Padda.