Betcha didn't think it could be done, but I'm having an epileptic seizure,
while I write!
Isn't that a neat trick. Isn't that a great way to spend a Friday night!
I could see this coming since about six, when I discovered I'd missed my morning anti-seizure meds again. I might as well have tied myself to the railroad tracks. I can hear that train a comin' down the tracks, I can feel the wheels a'poundin' in my bones.
Perhaps the worst of this is having failed myself so.
I had an aura a little while ago -I briefly hallucinated an unpleasant smell - then had left head pain, and now my left hand kind of wants to wander off and paw the air while my thinking gets foggier and foggier until I can't think how to move anymore and soon this head pain will make it too nauseating to move...
Most people expect I'd be flopping around on the floor distressing everybody who sees, but this is what they call a complex partial seizure. It doesn't involve the motor center of the brain like a grand mal seizure does, so I can sit here and type even while this electrical storm is going off in my brain.
Oddly enough, this is the easy part. I can't feel much of what is happening now. I won't notice how thoroughly what's happening now is deranging my brain functions until tomorrow, when post-ictal zombification sets in. Then it's headaches and confusion and fatigue for twelve to thirty six hours.
If I can sleep tonight that is. The meds are good for preventing fires in the brain, but not so good for putting them out. These damned seizures generally won't let me sleep. Over a decade of insomnia before I got the meds right!
Well, I've gone to Grassroots and gotten a pair of their best baked goods into my belly, -- props for the quality, service, and compassion -- and I've got my Brainwave Generator running an audio headache treatment at top volume. Maybe this time it won't be so bad, I think...maybe this time will be different. Just like I always do...
I don't know why I post this melodramatic real-life vignette.
Maybe it's because I think a lot of people have this disease who don't know it any better than I did for thirty five years. Maybe it will help them make the decision to ask their doctor for an EEG.
Maybe it's the same impulse that leads men to place notes in bottles and throw them into the sea. Maybe it's just to draw attention, or because this is just such a lonely fix I'm in.
John Steinbeck observed that we humans are lonely creatures, and that we share stories because they make us feel less alone; they make us feel 'yes, it's that way with me too'.
America has a culture of fear that makes it necessary to avoid showing any weakness, and that just makes the ills to which all flesh is heir harder to bear for Americans. (Nor will Americans say I'm sorry which makes of it a nation of lonely people.)
So maybe I share this because sometimes showing a little bit of vulnerability helps those worse off, and better off, to know YOU are not really so alone, as we make our way past the seeming impossibilities of our solitary nows, into our somehow tomorrows.
:slaugh:
Bless you all.
Please, contrive to thrive.
And please, "dammit, be kind."
-Kurt Vonnegut 