Looking out my window and at the weather app on my phone tells me that it's no longer winter, which is a little hard for me to process since this hospital stay began in early December and the last time I was outside was in February. Lemme tell you: I'm not a fan of everyone … Continue reading It’s Nice Out, and I Hate It
I've now entered a new stage of my ketogenic-diet-for-seizure-control experiment. More accurately, since this is a joint effort in which he cooks the food and I eat it, my husband and I have made the transition to a stricter and, with any luck, more effective phase of (my) ketoing for (my) medical purposes. It was … Continue reading Cooperative Ketoing
It's a pretty normal Saturday in hospital land. I've eaten many things and drunk many Ketocals. I've socialized a little (something I wasn't doing much of when my postictal psychosis was at its worst) and considered building a new LEGO set. I've had a seizure. My seizure frequency means that I wake up knowing that … Continue reading A Glimmer of Hope for “a Challenging Case of Very Intractable Epileptic Seizures”
As Canada locks down to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Toronto—the city in which I live—has taken bold, necessary steps to “flatten the curve.” Elementary and secondary schools are closed. Public libraries are closed. Most retail outlets are closed. Universities have transitioned to online learning. Lots of other stuff has happened in the gap between … Continue reading A COVID-19 Post to Add to the Millions in Your Inbox (Please Read!)
Hey! 👋 It’s me with another of my incredibly sporadic updates. There’s been a lot going on in my brain over the past few weeks, so naturally I'm choosing now, when I’m most likely to commit egregious spelling and grammar errors and to produce a longwinded and disjointed post, to break my blog silence. If … Continue reading Another Update
For several weeks, I kept going back to the same now-musty post in my drafts folder, making minor changes, staring at what I’d written, and then inevitably becoming overwhelmed and distracted by other tasks, 9.5 times out of 10 a meal or a bottle of Ensure Plus. It was time to acknowledge that the longer, … Continue reading Eight Weeks, and All I Have to Show for Them Is a Mostly Unedited Blog Post (and lots of empty Ensure Plus bottles and many seizures and significant progress)
Yes, I mean news news, not news of the personal-and-complainy variety. Yesterday I ran across this article about five-year-old Emma, who's the first patient in Canada to have the most recently released VNS model implanted. When she was seven months old, Emma was diagnosed with the seizure disorder infantile spasms (IS); her parents are hosting an … Continue reading Some Positive VNS News in the News
This video and article about a young girl (Pepper) with epilepsy whose parents were told that she couldn't ride an accessible GO Transit car popped up in my social media feeds a few days ago. As you might imagine, it made me so, so angry. In the interests of encouraging you to click this link so … Continue reading Epilepsy in the News: GO Transit, Questions of (in)Accessibility, and an Angry Blogger
As I write this, I'm on my way home from the vacation in British Columbia that I had to reschedule last month. As I actually post this, I've been back in Toronto for several days. This means that I made it to my departure date without needing to reschedule for a second time; made it to … Continue reading A Short, Self-Congratulatory, and Poorly Edited Post (I Went on a Trip and Didn’t Die!)
In my last post, I promised that the next one would be about ice cream. Since I’m a woman of my word, here are ten paragraphs about ice cream. Count 'em. I began writing this post as I greet each new day: by making a list. Since along with being a woman of my word … Continue reading Some Frozen Treats I’ve Eaten This Summer, Most of Which Were Delicious
De Morbo Sacro: Life and/with Epilepsy 