I met with my epileptologist last Wednesday to follow up on the hospitalizations that seem to have plagued me this summer. Each of these mini vacays (ha…) from my everyday life has resulted in a heavier medication load than ever before, and since I've been deemed ineligible for resective surgery (for now, at least), I'm … Continue reading Becoming a Cyborg/Making Decisions/Drawing Questionable Pictures
It's been a while. (I'm sorry.) I have three major updates, as well as many minor ones, but I haven't been able to get myself to open a tab, write a few paragraphs, and click "publish" in over what—two weeks?—so I thought I'd start with something short and sweetish to break the proverbial ice and … Continue reading Rebreaking the Proverbial Ice
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. … Continue reading Forty-Five Seconds
I’m home! A neurology resident stopped by my room yesterday and told me that since I was doing better than expected, I would be discharged and my medication titration would continue on an outpatient basis. And so the wires on my head were taken off, prescriptions were called in to my pharmacy, a discharge summary … Continue reading Home
This will be short: my brain still isn’t working at top capacity, and I don’t want to look back at my blog posts at some future date and be embarrassed by an entry with an abundance of typos and scattered thoughts. At the same time, I feel it’s important to provide an update since lots … Continue reading What’s Been Happening (ICU, Etc.)
I got my eyebrows waxed yesterday. Lest you think that I've decided to experiment with beauty blogging, let me immediately assure you that this particular eyebrow-maintenance experience is, indeed, relevant to the theme of my blog. You can also rest assured that my brows are now "on fleek," as the kids of today, or maybe … Continue reading Eyebrows and Epilepsy: Things That Are Only Tangentially Related
I woke up yesterday morning to two missed calls and a voicemail from an "unknown" number. I've been doing this chronic-illness thing long enough to know that 95% of the time, if you're a heavy user of the health-care system, an unknown caller means a medical office, usually one in a hospital. Sure enough, it … Continue reading Same-Day Appointment with My Epileptologist: Success/the Beginning of a Multi-Month Pregabalin Breakup
On Monday, a friend sent me an illustration from an Instagram account that I'd never heard of (I'm now hooked). Though the artist's life experience is, of course, different from my own, I was struck by how deeply her sentiment—one that I didn't realize I shared—resonated with me. I'm guessing that a visual would be … Continue reading Inspiration Expectation: Why It’s Not OK to Want Me to “Perform” for You
And now, back to a post that I was working on before I was distracted by less-pleasant events. As the title of this post gives away, I recently had my first post–brain injury night away from the security of my husband and apartment in the form of a Saturday–Sunday trip to London, Ontario. I had … Continue reading First Post-ABI Night Away from Home: Major Anxiety, Major Success
Well, what was likely the inevitable happened: I landed myself back in hospital, in the same unit in which I spent most of the first two months of 2017. Let's hope that I’ve gotten it out of my system now. On Tuesday evening, I had a series of five tonic-clonic seizures at home in the … Continue reading Back to 5B
De Morbo Sacro: Life and/with Epilepsy 