Seizures and Near-Death Experiences

So once, some 3 years ago, a real terrible flu almost killed me. Not directly, don't be jumpin to conclusions now. I fell. But that's pretty far into this recount of medical issues that have plagued me.

I started out right…I think.

So when I was 2, my parents decided to move from Iran to the states to live a better life. Red tape on both ends caused a delay in passport approval, so myself and my mom and dad had to stay in Germany for a year, livin with my dad's John Kerry-lookin man of a sister [she's pretty ugly]. We were in limbo; not welcome back in Iran, but not yet welcome in the U.S. If I had to guess I'd say the whole ordeal of takin off in airplane at the age of 2 [I was told I was cryin hysterically durin the whole liftoff] and bein thrust into a new country away from your comfortable surroundings twice within two years [Iran -> Germany, Germany -> America] kinda fucked me up. Or maybe I was jus born a really scared kid. I was a crybaby for a while, no doubt.

It started in Germany. When I tried to sleep, I'd have these things called night terrors that awakened me with bloodcurdling screams and strong convulsions, except I was still asleep. Technically. This obviously scared the living shit outta my parents.

There was a time, I think in Iran, where I thought a watch battery, y'know those little circular ones, was candy. So I ate it. How is this relevant you say? Well, for much of my life I was under the impression that battery acid that had leaked from it had somehow messed up my nervous system and sown the seeds for future seizures, but that wasn't the case. Independent events, but battery acid…can kill you. It didn't break open inside my digestive tract. I passed it through eventually and I was safe.

Ya can't blame me though, the shit looks like an M&M to a 2 year old. >.>

The seizures grow worse

So what the fuck is a seizure anyway? It's an extreme overfiring of neurons in your brain

that makes your body look like it's bein electrocuted if it's bad enough. I oughta explain that there's two kinds. There's the violent shakin ones that most people think of when they hear "seizure". Y'know, foamin at the mouth and all that. This is what epileptic seizures [those caused by flashin lights] always look like. I never had epilepsy, but I still had to grow up with this goddamn vulnerability to random attacks. Non-epileptic seizures are a rare kind, and I'm still convinced that mine were psychologically-rooted. Anyway, there's also milder ones in which random bodily functions shut down…

I call it "vegetable mode".

As a kid my friends who saw me go into it would call it "the thing". It's hard to explain, but it's like…your sight works, yet you can't perceive things around you. You're aware of voices or other noises around you existin, but they don't get converted into comprehensible language or anythin that your brain can understand. You don't retain any environmental stimuli when you're in vegetable mode; all sights and sounds and smells go right through you as if you weren't even there.

Oh and most importantly, you can't move. Or speak.

If you were in the middle of a sentence when you enter vegetable mode, the words become caught at the top of your vocal cords as your body shuts down. You hafta strain yourself real hard to break it, which causes you to yell if you had a sentence to finish and make a big jerking motion forward once it's over. I had this tendency to start motioning as if I was cracking my knuckles, while my head shook from side to side with my eyes rolled up into my head, for as long as I was in veggie mode. It looked scary, like I was possessed.

A Bump on the Head

Fast-forward a good few years to the lines that I opened with. By switchin from this non-effective seizure medicine called Depacote to this other medicine that I can't remember the name of, my seizures dwindled in strength and became less and less frequent. They eventually disappeared by the time I was 13, and to this day I stand cured of havin seizures.

So between 13 and 15 I had never been hospitalized. All was good. But one shitty weekend in March '06 I came down with a really awful flu. I'm allowed to stay home Monday. I think it was that day that it happened.

My mom wakes me up from bed not too long before noontime, and I feel really groggy, stuffed up, weak, dizzy. I amble toward the bathroom to wash up and brush my teeth with my mom holdin me up with her shoulder. I walk in, slowly swing the door shut, look at my sickly self in the mirror for a few seconds, and put toothpaste on my brush. But before I'm able to start brushin my teeth, another stronger wave of light-headed dizziness hits me. I move back a little bit and take a seat on the covered toilet, jus to catch my shortening breath and attempt to wait the dizzy off.

I stand up…blood pressure drops immensely…I faint.

Jus the angle that I was standin in and my above-average height made me fall backward and bang my head with all the force of a 13x-pound male teenage body. Not jus into the bathtub, no, on the faucet. On the little knob that sits atop the faucet to be exact. Well, I shouldn't be callin it little…that shit doesn't feel so little when it's lodged in your head.

Well okay, that's a little bit exaggerated. It did leave a noticeable dent in the backa my head, but my head bounced/slid off after I fell onto it. The wound was only about an inch wide, and maybe only an inch deep, but hot damn did that shit bleed. I was wearin a white T-shirt and by the time I woke up, 3/4 of it was turned red, and the bathtub had a thin layer of blood that covered like half of its floor's surface area.

So I'm passed out. And here's the deal. I'm an only child. Both my parents work. A lot. They coulda easily not been at home which woulda resulted in me bleedin to death while unconscious. Fortunately, both were home, and my mom came upstairs cuz she heard a loud thud from below. Thought I had broken somethin, but she didn't think that somethin was me. She woke me up and called an ambulance — I had no memory of passin out or fallin and for some reason I couldn't feel the pain. I was so mentally out of it that I thought I had been takin a nap in the tub.

Long story short, there was a 911 call, paramedics, a gauze head bandage that made me look like this guy, morphine that got me all loopy, a 6-inch-long needle that went into the back of my head while I was on morphine [I didn't feel any pain, but the needle goin in still shook me up], an overnight hospitalization, 6 stitches [the first time I had stitches in my life].

All this, and I never broken a bone or gotten a cavity in my life. Ain't that some shit.