One of my favourite things in the world is to slide between clean sheets - why is it that my bed feels so much more comfortable with freshly laundered sheets?
If you haven't seen UFC from last night yet, don't click on the spoiler.
This is my countdown to the Sopranos - 51 minutes.
Friday afternoon around 2pm I started to feel the familiar sensations. I had the foresight to grab a notebook and a pen and record it all as it was happening. 4 pages later.....
I had about an hour of auras, slipping in and out, and then finally a small seizure that lasted about 10-15 seconds. I was conscious the whole time - writing, I even made a phonecall to S.
So if you've ever wondered what it feels like to have a seizure:
SPOILERS! (Click to view)There are visions of a certain place and a certain emotion that keep flitting through my head. I can't grasp them, and while I am usually trying to quell the visions today I want to confront them. There's a problem though, and one I can't fix without unleashing a torrent of worse problems: the medication. The medication is designed to prevent my brain from going to that place. Thank god for that, but at the same time - I'm frustrated. It is no secret that I believe that, for me, epilepsy and anxiety are co-dependent, they cannot exist in my brain without each other. I also believe that affecting one directly effects the other - repressing the signals in my brain that want to freak out also repressed the parts that I need to work on to be healthy - mentally and physically.
So as I sit here being pulled into that place, that other dimension, I want to go with it, to feel all of it, even if it may mean a seizure relapse. It starts and then leaves just as quickly and I am unable to conjure it on my own. Think about it for a minute, try to understand how terrifying this experience can be: you are walking, breathing, easting as usual, yet every few minutes, or even seconds, the actual fabric of your reality is being pulled open and you are being sucked into another dimension or place.
This is what a seizure feels like when you are on anti-seizure medication.
This is also what an anxiety attack can feel like / has felt like.
There are brief moments during these experiences that it all feels like too much and I don't want to experience it anymore - I'm just a for on a bigger dot on a bigger dot on a bigger dot, and so on and so forth until my brain wants to explode. Maybe it has and maybe this accounts for the few generalized seizures I've had.
I used to welcome this, to let it happen - I'm thinking of last night and I know what I did but its almost as tough that person is someone else, that life and all its history is not mine - I would see a car mirror ornament or smell chalkdust and the feeling would wash over me. I would let it because it wasn't so bad. It was different. But since I collapsed that first time I no longer feel like it is no big deal. Since that first collapse there has been very little differentiation between what accounts for a seizure and what accounts for anxiety. It's all the same.
I'm sitting here in my home, which is actually one of the worst places to be when I feel like this - the familiar is what always gets me - and I want it to come, to throw me down, so that I can be done with it and live the rest of the day peacefully. I know this place and all its contents but it scares me. When I start to slip they are no
longer mine.
I feel like today I am going to collapse.
I can no longer tell the difference. The EEGs tell my doctors this is seizure activity, by-the-book.
I start to think of all the people I know, and they don't seem real.
I close my eyes and envision the layout of my home. When I open them I don't see that.
And now I'm just exhausted.
I want to grab it and confront it but every time I try it escapes.
How much longer until this is finished? I wish there was a magic emergency pill that could put my brain signals to sleep.
I almost wish I would lose consciousness. The worst part is knowing what is happening, being unable to stop it, and wondering whether this time you will collapse.
My home is as big as an apartment building.
Something about Ajax
There's a driveway and a parking lot
Trees
School
After: better visualization
37 minutes to Sopranos!
Keep On Rawkin!!