I was about to turn this entry into a lesson about economics, but compounding interest is something you can track: you’ve got the original amount, a compounding interest rate (earning interest on the interest as well as the original amount), and after a couple thousand years, your nickel investment turns into a billion dollars. That’s my get-rich-slow scheme and you’re all welcome to try it.
But when it comes to seizures, the only part of that equation that exists is time, so not really applicable. I also don’t know how everything builds up over time, I just know that it’s only happened maybe four times that I can recall.
Previously, there’s been talking involved, so it’s much more noticeable. When I’m having a seizure, my ability to comprehend language is pretty much nil. After maybe 30 seconds, words start making sense again. I might need prompting to remember what I was saying, but I can usually get back to my original line of thought pretty quickly. When these other rare instances have happened, though, it’s like seizures are flashing on and off and it can last for an hour or two.
It’s beyond frustrating to think that my seizure is ending, I can say maybe two sentences, then it starts all over again. And when that’s happening, it’s hard to say who’s more frustrated: me or the person I’m trying to talk to. Or when it happens back in 2019 when it happened during a script reading. Teresa and I had been cast together in a community theater play as a married couple—when the entire cast got together to read through the script for the first time, I was struggling to follow along in the script, then say whatever my line was supposed to be… I can only imagine what some of my castmates who were meeting me for the first time might have thought. “Is the guy illiterate? Is English not his first language?” (I think the next rehearsal was the only time I can remember people being relieved that I have epileptic seizures.)
But I was right at the end of writing yesterday’s blog post, my thought process was moving pretty smoothly, and then it was gone. I know I should have grabbed the magnet and swiped my head, but part of me kept thinking, “It’s almost over, so if I wait for too long after the seizure, it won’t make a very good bookmark.” So I just scrolled back a sentence or two, then tried reading what I’d just written, see if I could get back to the original thought process. That might have worked if the words started making sense again, but they didn’t. I tried going back another sentence and start reading again, but still nothing. I managed to get brief moments of clarity, but not long enough to get a strong grasp of what I’d been trying to write. And that went on for maybe 45 minutes and I barely managed to squeeze out the last few sentences just before midnight.
My thought at the time was that I should post it, then go back and fix it in the morning. And then when I got to this morning, I didn’t want to go back and read it again. Maybe just a sense of discomfort, not wanting to read what I eventually bumbled out of my head and onto the computer screen. I’m pretty sure it made sense, but under the circumstances, that’s nowhere close to a guarantee.
And given that we’re in the midst of NEAM, it seems more appropriate to leave it the way it was originally written. If it’s a bunch of gibberish, well, now a lot of people are aware of what having a long string of minor seizures back to back will do to my writing ability (or lack thereof, depending on who you ask). But if I can figure out a way to use those seizures to create another get-rich-slow scheme… I think I’ll keep this one for myself.