Seizure The Day

So I have this really cool thing called “epilepsy”.

Just kidding.

I don’t really have epilepsy.

Did I get you?  Did I?

Were you like, “Oh, that little freak has epilepsy now too?  What a freak ball.”

Yeah, well guess what?

I really do have epilepsy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now who feels like an asshole??

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU MAKE ME SICK!  GO TO YOUR ROOM!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It started in Bangkok.  It was a week after my debut as a muay thai boxer.  (The actual fight is a story in itself, but the short form is this: I got punched in the head.  A lot.  By a guy named Ivan the Russian Twin Tiger.)

I was at school, teaching English to a class of college students, when I collapsed.  Woke up a few minutes later in the arms of my students, sweaty and confused.  I had no idea what happened.  And due to my student’s shitty English skills, they couldn’t properly convey exactly what had happened.  So I just assumed I fainted.  Because Bangkok is hot as fuck, yo.

A month later, it happened again.  This time, I went down in front of my night students, in a classroom double the size.  Mid-sentence, I just flew back, smacked my head on the board, and convulsed erratically on the floor for a solid minute.  This time I woke up in an ambulance.

You’d think I’d go and see a doctor or something, but nope.  I’m a stubborn ma’fucker.  It took one more seizure for me to learn my lesson.

I had a couch surfer from the Philippines staying with me (…and Gringo was his name-o). I had just met the guy, and my normal way to warm-up to any of my frequent international visitors was to play some motherfucking Nintendo together.

We had just beat a hard game, but before we could exchange hi-fives, I sprang up and torpedoed into the wall.  As my head collided with the wooden wardrobe behind me, my jaw clamped around my tongue, and a flurry of blood sprayed out of my mouth and painted the walls.  And if that weren’t enough, my eyes stretched open, and my eyeballs rolled way back into my head, so where my pupils SHOULD have been, my eyes were completely white.

In other words:

I LOOKED LIKE I WAS POSSESSED BY SATAN.

Gringo, my couch surfer, a guy who had JUST FUCKING MET ME, must’ve shit his fucking pants.  And when I came cognizant ten minutes later, I had proof of this. I looked in the doorway of my apartment, and there was 1. Gringo, 2. my landlord, 3. a team of paramedics, 4.  every neighbor that lived on my floor of the building, 5.  a unicorn wearing a ballet outfit.  Everyone who could have heard Gringo’s screams from a 2 mile radius was there, watching me like some sort of freak-circus.

I was no longer just a threat to myself.  My seizures were affecting everyone around me.

I needed to see a fucking doctor.  So I did.  He didn’t really say much.

I mean, he did, but he was speaking Thai.  I could speak Thai, and do things like order noodles on the street, and get in girl’s pants, and all the other important shit… but I have no idea what a fucking doctor is telling me about why my brain is causing me to have violent seizures.

I just kinda filled in the blanks with my own interpretations.  I stopped fighting competitively, and took some pills that the doctor prescribed me on.  The seizures stopped.  For awhile.

A couple months, after I was forcibly removed from the Kingdom of Thailand, I back in the US at my parent’s place, having a bowl of cereal.

And then… the ground was having a bowl of cereal.  MY bowl.  Which I knocked off the counter and shattered all over the floor when I fell off a high chair and blacked out on the kitchen floor.

When my mom found snoring on the floor, she thought I was just fucking around.  I do those kind of things sometimes with the fam, to “test” them and shit.  But when she saw the cereal bowl fragmented alongside me, she screamed.  My dad came running, and he screamed.  Shakira came running, and she screamed.  And then the three of them decided I should see a neurologist.

A few days later, I was in the neuro’s office.  He was a young Russian dude named Lenny.  And although he was well-intentioned, that son of a bitch made me cry.

I made two visits with him; one was an EEG test, another was getting the results.  The EEG test is a test where they stimulate your brain to sleep, and they look for any paranormal strange activity or synapses not firing correctly.  They put 20+ little wires on your head, which they attach with some sort of weak-ass glue that attaches right to your hair.  It took about an hour.

The second visit were the results.

He told me I likely have epilepsy.

I remember leaving his office that day.  I ran outside and waited for the elevator.  As I looked down, tears started to form in the corners of my eyes.  Epilepsy?  What the fuck?  Nobody gets that shit.  Nobody!

What caused it?  Was it the fight?  Why did I deserve that?    What happened if I were driving, or swimming, and had a seizure?  Would I need to take pills for the rest of every day of my life?

There were so many questions to be asked.  Many would be answered years down the line.  Many remain a mystery.

 

TO BE CONTINUED…