This might not be the actual date, but it’s the one I’ve chosen to celebrate the 10th anniversary of my last “involuntary loss of consciousness.” I haven’t had a blackout in a decade. My anti-seizure meds seem to be working…<\/p>\n
It’s strange that I can remember the exact dates of my two generalized tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizures: 9\/30\/91 and 1\/2\/02. Beyond those, I’m lucky if I can pin them down to a specific month. Except for this one, of course. April 16th was a special date, primarily because Minnesota suspends your driver’s license for six months after an involuntary loss of consciousness. If my last seizure had happened after April 19th, that six months could have carried over past my 26th birthday and I would have had to retake my driver’s test. At age 26.<\/p>\n
So when the necessary time had passed and it was a few days before my birthday, we were scurrying around to fill out paperwork so I could get my license back without sitting in a room full of teenagers for an entire day, facing a constant battle of wanting to bash my head against a table, hopefully leading to a voluntary<\/i> loss of consciousness.<\/p>\n
I don’t think I’ve written about my seizure in ’02 before, so I’ll try to give you all an abridged version of the story. Keep in mind that some of this is a little fuzzy, especially the order in which stuff happened, but 1 1\/2 weeks in the hospital tends to blend things together a bit.<\/p>\n
I was officially diagnosed with epilepsy during the summer of 2000, about a year after my first blackout. And I don’t think I’ve written about that, either. The day it happened, I was eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast with my little brother Justin at the table. I was just wearing a pair of soccer shorts, but he’s my brother (and a college student), I’m sure he’s seen worse.<\/p>\n
All of a sudden, my head felt fuzzy. And then I realized I was wearing a t-shirt.<\/p>\n
I asked Justin what just happened, so he explained that I stood up and said, “I’m cold”, then went to my room and came back wearing the shirt. When I walked up to the table, I looked down at my bowl of cereal and asked him, “Is this mine?” He confirmed it, so I started eating again. And then eventually asked him what just happened.<\/p>\n
You’d think that would be extremely scary. It might have been, but like I said, my memory is a little fuzzy. What I do<\/i> know is that it became part of life. Occasionally, I’d have a blackout and it would freak everyone else out a lot more than it did me. Maybe that’s because they had to witness what I said and did, whereas I just had a mild sense of vertigo when it was over.<\/p>\n
The reason I finally told the doctor? I was making the final preparations to go hiking in Philmont Scout Reservation with Justin and our cousin, Alec. I went to get my physical and was checking out just fine until I asked if it would be a problem that I was having occasional blackouts. There went my hike in Philmont.<\/p>\n
The doctors at Minnesota Epilepsy Group figured that my body had become acclimated to dilantin after so many years and it wasn’t working as effectively anymore. Thus, we began the process of what I called “medication hopping”: if one treatment didn’t work, we’d hop to the next. It’s my personal belief that one of the medications (or a combination or maybe all of them) is what screwed up my long-term memory.<\/p>\n
We tried various dosage amounts for… I think it was four different medications. There was even a period of time when they bumped me up to toxic levels of one kind of drug, but the doc thought it would be okay because I was “a big guy.” Thankfully, we gave up on that fairly quickly when it wasn’t working.<\/p>\n
Eventually, the doctor asked if a blackout every two months would be good enough. Seriously. He asked if that would be okay. And it wasn’t okay, so he scheduled me in to spend time in the epilepsy ward at United Hospital in St. Paul. Mind you, I was in there during my winter break as a first-year law student, so… yeah, not the kind of break I would have liked.<\/p>\n
The reason he wanted me to stay there was so they could put a skullcap on my head, push a bunch of pointy sensors against my skull really hard and watch my brain wave activity to see where the problem area was. With that information, he’d have a better idea of how to treat the problem and which medication(s) would work so we could stop medication hopping.<\/p>\n
I think I should probably make a highlighted version since it’s hard to create a solid timeline. Lord knows there were plenty of highlights, so this could be a pretty long entry overall. The only question is where to start.<\/p>\n
Maybe I’ll go with bragging rights since somewhere in the middle, they gave me some IQ tests. Even though the results made me feel smart, the tests also worked different parts of my brain and thus made different areas buzz inside my skull.<\/p>\n
One test was for language: the nurse was showing me pictures and I had to tell her what the things were. If I couldn’t remember, she’d pronounce the first three letters. Thus, she made the noise “sffff” for a sphinx and “treh” was a trellis. Those were the only two I needed help with, but we might have ended the test there because of that fact.<\/p>\n
Then there was the matching game. There were a bunch of rows on a page. In each row, there were five shapes that included different designs, then a sixth shape. If one of the five matched the sixth shape, put a check mark next to that row. I’m not sure how many rows were on each page, but I asked the nurse what to do if I finished the two pages I was looking at. She said to just turn the page, but I probably wouldn’t need to worry about that. After one minute, I was in the middle of page 4.<\/p>\n
I met someone in the ward who had a major problem with seizures, so they cut out a chunk of his brain. He’d already gone through surgery and had no problem showing me the 70 staples in his head.<\/p>\n
They made me wear a football helmet whenever I wasn’t in bed so I’d be less likely to crack my head open if I fell down (they made me keep the rails up on the bed for the first few days, too). One of the nurses there had a bunch of stickers and things sticking off her own helmet to make kids in the ward feel better about having to wear one. I wrote “HI” on mine using Band-Aids.<\/p>\n
I had visitors once in a while and one day, I was talking to my older brother Brent. During the conversation, a nurse came in and asked me to remember a word. I said okay, then kept talking until she came back. What was the word? I wasn’t sure. She asked me if it was “paperclip”. That didn’t sound right, so I said no. I was wrong.<\/p>\n
After a week or so, they took the sensors off and let me wash the goop out of my hair that was keeping the hair away from the sensors and theoretically helped improve the signal through my skull. Or maybe it was to help hold the sensors against my head. Or maybe they used it just to be mean, I’m not really sure.<\/p>\n
They also wanted to put some sphenoidals in my head for further data: little wires that went into<\/i> my temples about a quarter inch. Since I’d had plenty of time to get really shaggy, there was a lot of hair in the way, so two nurses came into my room and had a race to see who could shave off one of my sideburns faster.<\/p>\n
I ended up staying in the hospital as long as I did because they needed me to have enough seizures to give them enough information from my brain activity to make a decision medication-wise. My brain wasn’t obliging them. And they tried… well, I don’t want to say “everything”, but they tried a lot.<\/p>\n
They weaned me off my medication fairly quickly. After a while, I had one of my minor seizure days where there’d be three times when my head felt fuzzy and it was hard to think (if I’d had a book, I would have seen the words and not been able to read them). Three was a pretty consistent number on those days, I don’t know why. Given my past experience with those seizures, I didn’t even think to mention it to the nurse until the third and last one of the day. He was a little upset with me.<\/p>\n
Stress and lack of sleep can induce seizures as well, so one night, they tried both. Mind you, I have an extreme B personality, so her futile efforts were making the nurse a lot more stressed-out than me. Seriously, though, what’s supposed to cause a patient stress in a hospital like that?<\/p>\n
For a while, they made me walk around the nurses’ station with… whatever that pole with wheels is called since it was holding a monitor that was connected to the wires attached to my head. Technically, I could only walk partway around the nurses’ station because of the wires attached to my head, so I was going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Nada.<\/p>\n
When that didn’t work, they had me riding a reclining exercise bike for a while. I remember that part happened on New Year’s Eve because a group of people came into the epilepsy ward and starting singing Christmas carols. I thought that was really cool.<\/p>\n
I watched three movies after that: an animated version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (with a bunch of cartoon animals as the characters), “Meet the Parents”, and “Cobb”, which was about Ty Cobb (the baseball player), starring Tommy Lee Jones. Still nothing.<\/p>\n
I think they let me take an hour-long nap at that point, then woke me up again. If stress ain’t gonna do it, lack of sleep should induce something, right? Well, it did.<\/p>\n
They told me I could go to sleep at a certain time that night, but I wasn’t tired yet (one more time I surprised them), so I stayed up for another hour or so. When I woke up in the morning, my head felt fuzzy, a nurse dropped off my breakfast and then I was wearing a hospital gown. I’d been sleeping in soccer shorts during my entire stay, so something had definitely happened.<\/p>\n
They told me that the nurse had dropped off my breakfast first, then I started seizing. I don’t remember if they explained how bad it was, but they pointed out my piss-soaked shorts that they’d thrown into the corner of the room and I had a really nasty cramp in one of the muscles in my back. One of the nurses asked if I wanted heat or a cold pack or a massage for it. I think I was too embarrassed to ask for anything—story of my life back then—and that muscle kept getting worse over time until I started having back spasms whenever I sneezed. I ended up going to physical therapy a couple months later because I was uncomfortable asking for a back rub. Oops.<\/p>\n
That’s about all I can remember at the moment, but I think that’s a decent number of highlights. And even if I didn’t have a decent number of highlights, I can still say that the time I spent at the hospital was worthwhile because it led to my current prescription. I had to increase the dosage very slowly, which is probably why it took a couple months before the seizures finally stopped, but it did and it has and I hope it continues to do so for many more years. Ten seizure-free years and counting…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This might not be the actual date, but it’s the one I’ve chosen to celebrate the 10th anniversary of my last “involuntary loss of consciousness.” I haven’t had a blackout in a decade. My anti-seizure meds seem to be working… It’s strange that I can remember the exact dates of my two generalized tonic-clonic (grand … <\/p>\n