"Dealing"
  by: Amna

It changed who I am now. It changed who I will be. It was hope disguised as pain. How was I to guess? It was epilepsy.

An absolutely perfect first day at my absolutely new school. Thirteen years old. January 2001. 8th grade. Yeah. But only till after lunch. I walked to the gym from the locker room, and met it on my way. Only I didn’t recognize it. Maybe it came too fast. Maybe I reacted too slow. It was a wave of nausea, and an inexplicable fear… something I couldn’t and didn’t have to describe. Rush. Flash. That’s when it all began: the whirlwind of emotions that would control my mind, body, and soul for what seemed like eternity. When I regained consciousness, my head and muscles throbbed. My life had just been cut short by 90 seconds. It took all my self control and then some to keep from bawling. The worst possible end to an absolutely perfect first day. So I’d had a seizure. Shoot me now, I thought. And there would be everyone at school to face tomorrow. But no matter how hard you try to prevent it, dawn does set in after a hard night. It did. And I—stubborn, hardheaded—went to school determined to forget. It was awful, knowing from the way teachers smiled excessively, that they knew about my ‘secret’. A few months later, and after a few more seizures, my parents (one of whom is a doctor) decided it was time to confirm what they were almost certain of. As far as I knew, epilepsy was “a brain thing where you have convulsions and you don’t know it”. So I went in for an EEG. My dad tried to explain, but I wasn’t listening. “…abnormal… electrical… decision…” They wanted to classify the type. Treatment. Duration. In other words: I went into a room where the hum of machines was freakishly unnerving, and a nurse with an accent slopped goo in my hair, stuck wires to my brain, and I had to open and close my eyes for an hour! Yay! My open sarcasm kept me sane during that and the MRI. That one’s the tomb. Once I was diagnosed, they wanted to try to find the reason for my obvious case of status epilepticus. You know, tumors and the like. I wondered. So I was on medication and drifted into a word of silent fear each time I thought of my disease. I got great grades at school and made a bunch of cool friends, but the randomly occurring seizures drove me nuts! At the tennis court, in Photography class, and totally unpredictable. There was always a warning—an aura—but I never succeeded in stopping the inevitable. My coping mechanism was simply ignoring the issue. I refused to accept that a problem existed. Eventually, I forced myself to talk about my new found affliction. With the help of a very supportive teacher, my parents, and that little voice inside of me, I got better. But the seizures continued, out of the blue. So we added another drug. From 90 seconds, I hit 300 seconds of convulsing at a time. The worst part was regaining consciousness and the mind-numbing pain. Over time, I managed to delay an attack and lengthen its aura. On my ninth grade graduation, once again my ability to think was replaced by the gut-wrenching fear that I’m all too familiar with. But nobody noticed. It has been a year and a half now, and I’ve been seizure-free for 4 months. I learned to deal, and I’m at peace with both epilepsy and myself. It’s a part of me and that’s ok. I will be 15 soon, and nothing stands in the way of my dreaming and achieving. From skipping doses out of anger to crying long hours at night, it hasn’t been easy. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to drive, but I’d complain if I had a choice. We all have to deal sometime; the sooner the better. Epilepsy showed me my inner strength. So in a way, it’s been good for who I am and will be. It’s no big deal. Make life simple for yourself.