Ten seizure-free years and counting…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They also wanted to put some sphenoidals in my head for further data: little wires that went into 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…