Head Case, Episode 1

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… (Okay, technically, it was more like 17 years ago in the Milky Way. That’s right, kids, our galaxy is named after a candy bar.)

Did you like how I set that up? The title of the entry is a spin-off of a bad movie and doesn’t reveal that this is referring to the first “episode” I experienced. The specific date was September 30th, 1991. I was a few weeks away from my 15th birthday, a freshman in high school, no girlfriend, pimples in various places… pretty much just a normal kid. As normal as someone like me gets, anyway.

That morning, I woke up and pulled a microwave breakfast out of the freezer. It was the kind with scrambled eggs, bacon and potatoes—peel the plastic off the section with potatoes, then nuke it for a very unhealthy way to start the day. However, tearing the bacon into pieces and stirring it together with the eggs and potatoes… that was the good stuff, baby.

So I went through the usual routine: remove breakfast from freezer, peel plastic, then nuke. While the microwave was running, I sat down in a chair, rested my head on the cabinet behind me and closed my eyes, taking a three minute nap because, naturally, I didn’t get enough sleep the night before. When I opened my eyes again, my head felt a little fuzzy. And I was being rolled down the driveway strapped down to a gurney.

I don’t remember much of the rest of the day aside from briefly seeing out the back of the ambulance, but I guess they checked me into the hospital for an overnight stay, I didn’t have any other problems and I went home the next morning. (According to my medical record, though, I got in trouble for getting up and walking to the toilet without supervision. Sure, they wanted to make sure I didn’t fall down or anything, but when a man has to pee… dammit, he has to pee!)

After I got home, I learned what happened between resting my head and being in the gurney: my little brother Justin walked into the room and saw me sitting in the chair. My eyes were closed and I was upright, but my arms and legs were twitching and shaking. Naturally, he freaked. He ran into the other room to get my dad, who laid me down on the floor and called 9-1-1. During the entire seizure, there was no foaming at the mouth, no biting my tongue off, no kicking lamps off tables—just a lot of twitching and shaking.

They sent me to a neurologist shortly thereafter, but I wasn’t diagnosed with anything at that point. Apparently, people are capable of having a single seizure and that’s it. No more problems. Still, the doc gave me a prescription for dilantin as a precautionary measure, which I eventually started calling my “stupid pills”. They made it hard to pay attention or focus on homework for longer than fifteen minutes (if I was lucky). Consequently, my grades went downhill.

Consider: I was on the math team in 7th and 8th grade. That first year, we came in 4th place in Minnesota. I was a genius! Okay, maybe not, but I was still pretty good. Then I started taking dilantin in 9th grade. I coasted through algebra because, hey, I learned that stuff two years ago. I had more trouble with geometry and did rather poorly in pre-calculus. Thus, when my friends on the math team were taking AP Calculus and receiving college credit, I took Computer Math and Art of Math. Pretty bad, huh?

So it was a double-edged sword: stupid pills or possible seizures? Neither was good, but the lesser of two evils was the medication, so I kept taking that for many, many years. It was a routine that continued through college and beyond. However… (Three cheers for suspense, right?)