Kept my face off the floor, because I didn’t go to work this morning.
Fear seemed the better part of valor then, at about 4:30 AM; fear of another shoulder dislocation, fear of another scene at the work place (there have been other such scenes in the past), and fear just of another scene, period.
I was in a rather pre-seizure state; my organs all gearing up for the event, my bowels getting ready to evacuate (I love that word) and my stomach planning the same; the confusion penetrating the root of my brain; each breath became a thing, like an arm, to fold in front of me in preparation for sleep. It was becoming tedious.
Sleep wouldn’t come. Which is another indication of imminent trouble. I was in the prelude to a seizure, and falling asleep at that point would actually have completed the process. There are a few things staying awake can do, and delay a seizure is one of them.
Seizures in public are, I am told, a rather disruptive event to the general peace and tranquility of a given site. I say, “I am told,” because I am, blessedly, out-of-there as they say.
I have never before experienced such a thorough and pervasive unconsciousness as that which accompanies a seizure. Consciousness, being a fairly nebulous and, in my opinion, misunderstood entity, does not always leave behind an apparently sleeping and/or drooling individual of depleted language skills. When consciousness leaves it often leaves behind a fairly well operating individual. Such is the cerebral cortex that it is able to automate many of our fairly complex activities without much evidence that our activity is not being generated with spontaneous originality.
I assure you, for about a week after each of the two seizures I have had this month, in all activities, I was relying heavily on the horse to get me home.
Yes, I realize that includes this moment now.
Well, whoever said that writing was an activity that required the spontaneously original participation of the writer—or in some of the artifacts I’ve seen, any participation at all from the writer—must have been not a very experienced writer.
Writing is not merely an action of the intellect; not merely the output of a delightfully complex program for generating nearly proper grammar along a nearly consistent theme. Writing is a magic of the light, just like in a photograph. It is possessed of a flavor and a color, and of infinite possible interpretations and apparitions, some of them sensible, but some reaching us beyond our senses, in that untrodden place where magic speaks most profoundly.
If that ‘untrodden place’ is where I go when I have a seizure, then you’d think I might like to go there. But a seizure brings other consequences as well, and at 4:30 AM this morning, ah, I just didn’t want them brought.
Now, as I said, during such a prelude to a seizure, staying awake can delay it. But one cannot stay awake forever. In the particular situation I was in, I needed to stay awake until I could get a delightful little drug called Ativan on-board in sufficient quantity to repress the badsy seizure activity going on in the part of my brain which does not fall asleep. Well, maybe it does fall asleep on occasion. But it does not fall asleep while it is preparing an assault on the other uninvolved, peace-loving parts of my brain.
So, I took the dose prescribed by my neurologist to, in her words, “abort a seizure.” (I love an unanticipated turn of phrase.) And then I waited. My trip to that place beyond my senses was being aborted.
We diminish our own souls when we judge the drunk, blaming him/her for seeking only the stupor which is apparent to us. I have worked among drunks for many years, but I have so much to learn from them. They scare me so. Because (among other things) they go to that ‘untrodden place,’ the place where the light comes as if from the snow itself. Where all is not just white, but a hundred thousand shades of white, and twinkles with little sparkles, too. Where they can move about freely and not disturb a flake, nor leave a mark. They go to that place and have access to that sensibility.
And it looks to us like insensibility. As it should.
But don’t let it’s disguise fool you. And don’t think only the drunks are there; they are sort of like the tourists of the place. The natives are the mystics and the philosophers, the spiritualists who have transcended religion as much as their means allow. And very rarely, a writer, usually a dead one. They live there, and they look out at us—with great tenderness, it seems to me.
After waiting half and hour I still hadn’t quite got enough Ativan into my blood stream—and hence into my badsy brain cells—to facilitate dozing off safely. It was at about 6:00 AM that I finally concluded that it was safe to shut off the lights, figuratively speaking; this whole time I was laying in the dark in my bed, which is the only safe place to be when one is expecting a possible seizure.
Peace came softly, and you’d think I’d have been covered by those flakes of gentle light. But, no. It was just sleep.
And it is with a certain sadness that I return from my seizing enlightenment. Autopilot is not such a bad place to spend the day when gales of light and winds of winking wonderment sweep ’round to light/lift you and move you to places you’d have never found if you were at the controls.
I know—I think with a ‘knowing’ that comes from that place of snowy light—that I will be at work tomorrow, fit as a fiddle, and ready to deal with another cranky, miserable, misunderstood… saint.
