Being Alice: Slipped Away
It started with tapping.
(When I was little, I had numerous motor tics.)
I realized that the first two fingers of my left hand were tapping against my lips with increasing speed and pressure. I lost sight of the laptop screen. I was staring out the window, into the absolute darkness. I slipped away.
(It's funny that the HBO movie about Temple Grandin was playing on the TV.)
My head turned left. I was staring at the clock, and I could see the television out of the corner of my eye. The clock read 10:25 and it was an eternity.
(Some children with spastic hemiplegic cerebral palsy become severely hypertonic when stressed.)
I realized that my left arm had curled up tightly against my breast, and my hand was in the classic claw shape, trembling on my shoulder. It was painful. But I couldn't move. I had slipped away. I was still thinking. I was still here. But I was elsewhere too.
The clock read 10:26, then suddenly sped up to 10:27, and then... I came back.
This is so difficult to describe. I feel as though you would have needed to be inside my head with me. Perhaps you could have told me what I had seen, because I don't remember.
I was an anthropologist on Mars, but the Mars was my own mind.
(I should find that book, anyway.)
I have never had a complex partial seizure quite as bizarre as this. I don't know what to make of it. I want to analyze it obsessively and compulsively, but I can barely remember where I was. I need to try to remember. But I wonder if that might put me straight into another seizure, a different one, a more frightening one. I don't think temporal lobe epilepsy works quite like that, but this is what research is for. Thank the gods for the internet.
I feel all over the place. I need to put myself back together. I need to both slow my brain down and speed it up so it's back to where it was.
My left wrist hurts now, and everything is spasming. It will stop. It is already starting to stop. As long as I breathe. Remember to breathe.
See, I'm fine.
(When I was little, I had numerous motor tics.)
I realized that the first two fingers of my left hand were tapping against my lips with increasing speed and pressure. I lost sight of the laptop screen. I was staring out the window, into the absolute darkness. I slipped away.
(It's funny that the HBO movie about Temple Grandin was playing on the TV.)
My head turned left. I was staring at the clock, and I could see the television out of the corner of my eye. The clock read 10:25 and it was an eternity.
(Some children with spastic hemiplegic cerebral palsy become severely hypertonic when stressed.)
I realized that my left arm had curled up tightly against my breast, and my hand was in the classic claw shape, trembling on my shoulder. It was painful. But I couldn't move. I had slipped away. I was still thinking. I was still here. But I was elsewhere too.
The clock read 10:26, then suddenly sped up to 10:27, and then... I came back.
This is so difficult to describe. I feel as though you would have needed to be inside my head with me. Perhaps you could have told me what I had seen, because I don't remember.
I was an anthropologist on Mars, but the Mars was my own mind.
(I should find that book, anyway.)
I have never had a complex partial seizure quite as bizarre as this. I don't know what to make of it. I want to analyze it obsessively and compulsively, but I can barely remember where I was. I need to try to remember. But I wonder if that might put me straight into another seizure, a different one, a more frightening one. I don't think temporal lobe epilepsy works quite like that, but this is what research is for. Thank the gods for the internet.
I feel all over the place. I need to put myself back together. I need to both slow my brain down and speed it up so it's back to where it was.
My left wrist hurts now, and everything is spasming. It will stop. It is already starting to stop. As long as I breathe. Remember to breathe.
See, I'm fine.