confused. Restless. A deep-brain alarm waking me up every 2 seconds or every 20 seconds; I don't know which because there's no telling how time passes when I'm like that. But being like that is familiar to me, it happens once or twice a year, on the mornings when I am about to have a seizure. When I'm like that I try to sleep, but I start to dream with an edge of desperation, like my brain is trying to latch onto something so the world won't slip away. But such flimsy anchors as dreams can't hold my mind in place, and when it starts to slip, it jolts me back awake. Eventually it slips and doesn't come back. Then I don't know anything.
Friday morning I tried to prevent it. I stayed in bed and took extra anti-seizure meds, and prayed I would not throw-up, which also usually happens before a seizure. My body gets itself ready for trouble, and empties everything. If I could avoid that, and sufficiently increase the Dilantin level in my blood, then there was a chance I could avert the seizure. I've been able to do that before. I stayed in bed. I was able to get some restful sleep, but I didn't make it out of the woods. At about 3:30 PM, I woke up with a sore tongue and a dislocated shoulder—I'd had a seizure in bed. So I called some friends to bring me to the hospital, and I unlocked the back door so they could get in. When they arrived, they found me on the floor beside the bed; I'd had another seizure, and landed on my face.
I spent Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday night in the hospital. Now I'm home, but I feel like I have a hangover that won't go away, which I think is because of a procedure they did called a spinal-tap, in which fluid inside the spinal column is drawn out through a needle (it's a small amount, but compared to the total amount we have at a given time, it's a significant percentage). It's a test for gross bleeding in the brain, and for meningitis. It takes the body a few days to replace the fluid, and until then I am going to feel hung over.
i have my conscious mind back, but I look like a goth with exactly half my makeup on; my left eye is a perfect shiner. I could be the dog on the Little Rascals. And clarity comes back slowly. It has taken me all day to get this far (actually, after a seizure, I have to make a transition from an altered method of manipulating my thought processes, very gradually, back to the synaptic interactions with which my brain is familiar.) I know that sounds specious, and I have no data to prove it, but that's what happens every time I have a seizure; everything from immediately before it to several days after it is recorded differently—if at all—in my memory, and it is only when many of my friends are involved that I am even able to recall months later that the seizure actually occurred. Re-experiencing their experience of my seizure makes it real for me. Otherwise, I have trouble accessing any of my memories of the event. I had lots of friends involved this time.
As a matter of fact, my friends told me about the cute nurse, Chris, in the ER, and as a result I was able to recall a vague little scrap of memory which I would otherwise have discarded. He was with me throughout my stay in the ER, he was very cute and very sweet, and he looked very concerned for me, and when I am in that condition is one of the very few (or only) times when I am completely unselfconscious. That's rare. But what is even more rare when I am vulnerable like that, is that someone like Chris is there to appreciate my need and take care of me. I'm really glad he's a nurse.
Before I seize, I vomit violently. It is a preparation my body makes for the seizure that must be of life and death importance because I do it so fiercely. Chris had come with me to get my shoulder X-Rayed, and I was overcome with a wave of nausea. I remember vomiting a small amount into one of those little kidney-shaped emesis basins which he had given me, but I sent him to get a bigger basin. I had been afraid that little emesis basin would be woefully small, and I was mildly shocked to see the blood in my vomit, because I wasn't aware I was bleeding; it was my eye and my nose that were bleeding, but nobody had given me a mirror. Chris must have been a great comfort to me, because I remember thinking just then that I missed him.
As I sat on a stretcher, alone in X-Ray, on the verge of heaving my guts out, with a horrible, anxious, I-wish-this-would-pass feeling, and a bloody eye, lip, nose and an excruciatingly painful dislocated shoulder, nothing could have looked better than the sight of that blonde boy carrying a big soak-my-feet size basin, and scurrying back toward me to put his arm around me again, and be for me such a serious comfort in my extreme trouble.
isn't it just like a boy like me to fall for a care giver like Christopher?
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