A Bad Day

Look at me, blogging more regularly! #bored

The bad news is, as the title of this post makes abundantly clear, that this one’s a real downer. Sorry. I’ll balance that out a little with a picture of the bulletin board in my room. In case you’re wondering, the duck’s name is Marvin, and he works in HR.

This past Thursday was a bad day.

Throughout the morning and the afternoon, I had a whole bunch of partial seizures. As in, enough of them that I lost count and would need to ask my nurse for a number if I cared enough to provide an accurate report (and since I’m too lazy to get up and walk to the nursing station, I’ll leave it at “a whole bunch”).

Partial seizures suck, but the recovery time from the seizures themselves is, for me, relatively short. The major problem associated with them—again, in my experience—is the postictal psychosis that I’ve been experiencing with pretty consistent frequency: due to how my particular partial seizures manifest, danger comes when I—as a hypothetical example—am 100% sure that I’m at acute risk of being harmed and so escape from this locked unit by trailing a cleaner and then manage to get out of the hospital and several blocks away before realizing that I have no money and that the strangers around me also want to hurt me and so start to panic. But again, that’s just a hypothetical example.

What really got me on Thursday was the tonic-clonic seizure that struck after dinner and knocked me out until Friday morning. I didn’t return to my current baseline until yesterday.

Indeed, I slept for almost thirteen hours and woke up the next day sore, nauseated, sad, and angry. My last tonic-clonic seizure had been in January, and using one of my favourite strategies—delusional thinking—I’d managed to convince myself that I’d never, ever, have another one. So when I came to, felt the muscle and head pain I always do after a tonic-clonic, and waited for my worn-out noggin to piece together what had happened, my instinct was to begin attributing an incredible amount of meaning to that single neurological event. 

At some point (OK, while seeing my psychologist on Friday afternoon), I made the decision to stop. A seizure is a seizure. I used to have tonic-clonic seizures all the time. I don’t have them as frequently anymore, but I still do on occasion. This seizure doesn’t have to be anything but a blip. It doesn’t have to be the beginning of a pattern. It doesn’t mean that I should stop eating and go home because of an unfounded belief that there’s a link between (unhealthy) eating patterns and seizure control. It doesn’t mean that I’m responsible for the seizure—that I caused it myself—by working so hard to get to a healthy weight, which will, on the contrary, most likely improve most aspects of my life, including my seizures.

I wish someone could tell me with certainty why I had that tonic-clonic seizure on Thursday, but the only sure thing about this process is that I need to push through whatever weird stuff happens with my seizure patterns and body, reminding myself that I have quick access to excellent medical care. There’s light at the end of the tunnel, even if at times it seems pretty dim.