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7:46 p.m. - 2003-05-27
Seizures and green doors.
In honor of "East of Eden" and one of my favorite Cramps songs, I painted our front door leaf green today.

We got some leaf green exterior semi-gloss oil paint in the reject paint pile at Lowe's yesterday, and I thought it would be perfect to repaint the door. It had been a hideous institutional green, the colour of moldy cat barf.

How do I know it was the colour of moldy cat barf?

Ummmm....let's just leave that unanswered, shall we?

*****************************

Ok, so I'm sitting here at the computer saying to myself, over and over, "I am not a cranky bitch! I am happy and relaxed!"

I don't know why I'm having this out of sorts moment. I also just took some more Formula 303. Yah! Drugs! That should help!

I almost think I'm on the verge of having a seizure. Someday I should write a whole weird entry about my epilepsy. Most people are horrified when I say this, but I actually feel having seizures is not such a bad thing. In fact, it has really made my life interesting in a lot of significant ways.

Take the auras I get before my seizures. When most people have an aura, it's like a strange dream state or maybe they hear things. Dostoevsky had ecstatic trances before his seizures. Me? I get panicky and smell things burning. Pretty interesting, huh?! If Bruce is home I ask him if he smells anything burning. If he says no, I immediately launch into five minutes of "Are you sure? Are you SURE? You really don't think anything is burning? I distinctly smell something burning! It must be the iron! Or the stove! The cats have set the living room on fire! Don't you SMELL IT??!!"

Poor man. Don't you all want to be married to me?

If Bruce isn't home, I rush around the house trying to figure out if it smells more like the upstairs or downstairs is burning. When it is obvious that no flames are in evidence, I go outside to see if there is any smoke pouring out of the attic vents. All this can last quite a few minutes before I realise that really, I should just go inside and lie down before I start wandering the neighborhood singing nursery rhymes.

Oh yeah, that's the other weird thing about my seizures. I don't usually have grand mals, which is what most people associate with seizures. I have complex partials, also called temporal lobe seizures, or, in neurologist's slang, I am a "walkie-talkie". In other words, when I have a seizure I am not conscious of what I'm doing, but I'm still doing it. "It" being anything from singing to crossing streets against traffic, to turning off radios to turning on stoves.

I almost got hit by a truck in England because I walked out in front of it. I would have walked straight into a canal in Holland except a nice lady grabbed me - she thought I was on drugs! I fell down a flight of stairs in Paris, and walked into a plate glass window in Prague. Yup, all my European holidays have the special memories that only having epilepsy can provide!

Of course I have no memory of these things when it's over.

The goofiest seizure I had was while standing in line at a bank about six years ago. I had that familiar "either this banks on fire or I'm going to have a seizure" feeling, and then the next thing I knew, the woman in front of me in line was smiling at me.

"I love that song, too!" she beamed. "I sing it all the time when I hear it on the radio!"

"Oh. Um. Yes! It's a great song!" I said, totally flummoxed. I had obviously had a seizure. Had I been singing?! Good Lord, with my hideous voice?! I had been singing some popular tune, probably at the top of my voice, in a bank line, ferchrissakes!! How insane is that?

Believe it or not, I couldn't screw up the courage to ask her what on earth I had been singing. I had a feeling I didn't want to know. It was probably a Petula Clark song. Or maybe something by the Cramps.


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