I'm not sure, it's almost as if I wasn't really there...
It was like being lost in a fog...
My vacation was supposed to have begun last Monday, the 12th of December, but I had some important things at work, very difficult and complicated things, that simply had to be taken care of beforehand, and postponed it one week.
My attitude upon waking before work last Monday morning was that I was going to calmly and patiently work through all of the appointments this week, day by day, dealing with my condition on a daily basis, whatever it might be. My spirit was exhausted but I know from my military training that you just stay calm and put one foot in front of the other, and keep going when the going gets tough.
There was relatively little migraine activity last week. Instead I had a lot of seizures- 6-8 of them per day, and they were longer and stronger than usual, up to 5 minutes each. On top of that the struggle with anxiety and depression was worse than usual. That part of it climaxed Friday morning. I actually thought everything was going according to plan after waking, sitting in bed with my first cup of coffee and getting mentally set for the day. I was calm and ready when I did finally throw back the covers and get up to get ready for work. I had made it through the whole week and had just this one last day, then three glorious weeks of vacation!
While I was making my sandwiches I was suddenly hit by an emotional tsunami. It came from out of nowhere, completely unexpected and without any warning whatsoever. It was too huge, too devastating, for me to be able to adequately describe it. Maybe a couple of terms: utter hopelessness, complete loneliness, despair, a feeling of senselessness, devastating shame at my weakness, and a million other things. A gaping black hole wanting to swallow me in my entirety. Hot tears welling up from somewhere deep within me. My entire being just screamed to ride out into the desert all alone and never, ever come back again.
Mornings are a rough time for a lot of people, and my soon-to-be is no exception. I called goodbye up the stairs as I was leaving and she came down, but she wasn't quite awake yet and snapped at me for some reason. Now she couldn't know what I was going through because I tend to keep my cards close to my chest, and besides, is everyone supposed to walk on eggshells around me all the time? All of my strength, all of my concentration, was focused solely on staying calm and not letting that storm take me over. I didn't even respond to her snapping at me. I couldn't afford to. If I were to divert my attention from staying calm in the face of that massive storm for even a fraction of a second, I would fall into that deep, black chasm...
It was on the way to work that the first seizure of the day hit me, and it was a bad one. Now the bike path I take to work is pretty narrow
I made it through the day, and believe it or not I managed to hold out against that emotional storm. I had several seizures throughout the day and when they hit I was successful in just quieting down and waiting until they were over, then going on with whatever I was doing. Quitting time was 2:30 pm, and the closer it got the more I felt my spirits lift, knowing that it would be the start of three weeks of vacation.
My youngest daughter lives a little over an hour from here and she moved into a new apartment this weekend. She told me last week that she had enough help and that I didn't need to come. My first thought was that she was worried about me and the Epilepsy, and might only be saying she had enough help for that reason. I'll never know because if it were true she'd certainly never admit it- to protect my macho feelings. But it's one more reminder of the fact that I can no longer live a normal life, no longer commit to being anywhere on any given day, not knowing how I'll be doing on that day. That hurts. That's embarrassing for a man who has been strong all of his life.
Who would have thought back on that late January day in 2008, when I had that first grand mal seizure, that I would never be free again, that Epilepsy would affect each and every day of my life from that day on? That small town, country hick neurologist I went to back then, the only one in the town I lived in at the time, told me it was all in my head and had been a one time thing, and I readily believed her. She had based that judgement on a few weekly EEGs that had come up clean over 3 months. A few years and a number of seizures later they found the seizure focus in my brain- it lies too deep in my brain to be easily seen on an EEG. I'd kind of like to go back there and tell her how much her diagnosis was worth! It doesn't matter though because she went into retirement not too long after that. Good riddance.
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