(ABC 6 News) – For the last few years, Parker Shanks’ life was ruled by a debilitating birth defect he didn’t even know he had.

The first time Shanks had a seizure, he was a junior in college.

Until then – he lived a carefree life – playing basketball and studying for classes.

It was a typical day when the first came out of the blue while spending time with a friend.

“Everything before that I had normal memory of just hanging out,” Shanks said, “and then next thing I know it’s probably 10-15 minutes later, I’m just laying down on the couch.”

After that — nothing would be the same.

“We’ve never dealt with anything like this,” said Parker’s mother, Susan Shanks. “We haven’t had this in our family, we don’t recall anyone in our family having had seizures. So for us, it was confusing.”

For about a year and a half, everything seemed normal. Parker was put on the standard medication for people after their first seizure.

Eventually though, Shanks’ condition took a turn for the worse.

Seizures became more frequent, and medication wasn’t doing anything to help.

Just trying to live became a hazard.

At one point, Shanks had been well enough to drive again, until one day he had another seizure behind the wheel.

“I was driving back from work and next thing I know wake up in the back of an ambulance,” he said.

He had gone off the road, narrowly missing a popular ice cream shop and running into a couple other cars parked nearby.

“That’s when it really hit the, hit the scarring kind of a feeling on that. And that without question will be a scarring moment forever.”

Years of testing got Shanks nowhere in figuring out what his condition was. Finally, he and his family decided to try their luck at Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

Doctors there found the problem almost immediately. Shanks and his family were shocked.

“We all looked at each other like, did he just, did we hear, like you know did he just say that,” Shanks said.

It was a small defect, barely a half-inch in size, that developed when Shanks was a baby.

They’re called encephaloceles. They occur when the skull plates that babies start with don’t fuse together properly throughout childhood. A gap is left behind, and a small piece of the brain can poke through.

“When that happens, that part of the brain can get scarred,” said Dr. Jeffrey Britton, a neurologist at Mayo and one of Parker’s doctors. “It can get kind of tugged and pulled, and the nerve cells will get quite irritated. Seizures can result from that.”

Within a week of the discovery, Shanks received a surgery from Dr. Jamie van Gompel that finally cured his seizures.

He’s now nine months seizure-free.

“There’s a lot of days where I kind of think about it,”he said, “I’m like ‘I haven’t thought about it the whole time.'”

Almost 3 million people in the U.S. have epilepsy, and studies show that for nearly 40% of them doesn’t help.

Shanks and his family hope that by sharing their story, they can help someone else find the answer they may be looking for.