Forty-Five Seconds

Forty-five seconds. A blip, and likely an inevitable one, after which I rolled over and went to sleep.

I’m making a real effort to convince myself that forty-five seconds mean nothing, but they keep tossing around my head, unwilling to simply be what they were—one complex partial seizure among dozens I’ve had this calendar year.

My husband told me this morning that he was happy that it happened. I knew what he meant: in a sense, we were both holding our breath until this played out, however it would. Was an hour and a half the new normal, as far as the length of my seizures was concerned? It couldn’t be, of course, but until I had another one, we’d be left wondering.

Our fear wasn’t baseless. While in the hospital last week, I had increasingly and abnormally long seizures over the course of a few days, until I was loaded with Ativan and Dilantin and things were brought under control. Perhaps ironically, it was my longest seizure-free streak in six months or so that was broken last night.

Of course, I knew that this breaking-of-streak was almost definitely going to come to pass; it was simply a matter of time. Whenever I go a while without a seizure, though, I unwisely start to let myself bask in the fantasy that maybe, maybe, maybe, I’ve finally found the right cocktail of medications. And then, poof: with a flurry of neurological dysfunction, the illusion is shattered.

But I’m willing to settle for this tentative compromise. Forty-five seconds I—we—can handle. Forty-five seconds really is a blip. Life goes on. Medication titration continues. I wait, with nervous anticipation, to see what the new normal will become.