After a Seizure

Well, I meant to write this one yesterday, but to be honest, my head was a little all over the place for the rest of the day. I seem to spend a lot of time in bed at the moment, having that "coming round" sensation. I'm sure W must be sick of me asking him how long I've been upstairs when I stagger back down in search of tea.

The trouble is, I really hate losing track of time, and I'm not usually in the right state of mind to check a clock or my watch before having a seizure to make it easier for me to calculate later. And a lot of the time, I really want to know how long I was "out". It's a control thing, I think. I have no control over how long I will be having an aura or seizure, or how long it will take me to sleep one off. But I feel as though if I know how long it all took, I can account for that time, and it isn't lost to me. Instead of yesterday being a haze, it becomes something I could plot on a graph. So, from time A-B, I was fine, then C-D I was having a seizure, E marks the time I was sleeping it all off, and suddenly the day makes sense, rather than just being this fog. Suddenly I am in charge again. The fog lifts, and with it the feeling that I am not in charge of my own life.

I don't know why this matters to me to the degree it does - for some seizures I will literally sit down and try and account for it all, blow by blow: "Well, first I fell over, and then my eyes started to roll, and then I felt my arm twitching..." and throughout that my mind adds in "Oh, and at that point I heard W say something to me and I felt him move me", or "And then I heard O talking in the background". I've written accounts of my seizures before in their immediate aftermath in a desperate attempt to claw back the time that I've lost. I will not let the seizure take that memory away, even if the memory is me falling off a chair and really hurting my head, or of going loopy and scratching my face or pulling my hair. Good memories, bad memories, they are all facets of myself, and I lose enough of them as it is. Sometimes I need prompting to remember things, sometimes I don't remember events even after being told, flat out, what happened. Those are the bad times.

I think the problem stems from the fact that I have a pretty good long term memory, but my short term memory is, well, crap. If I can file things neatly away into the long term storage, so much the better. Forgetting things is something that terrifies me. I have notebook after notebook detailing the events in books I am writing, and countless documents stored on my computer, my email account, other people's computers. Data loss is a potent threat to me. Somewhere, hopefully still in a readable condition, I have a folder containing stories I wrote when I was twelve. They all last about a paragraph, and most of them contain...well, nothing of note. But I still wrote them, and I hold onto that chance that I may look back at them and get a spark of inspiration that will spur me on to write a new story, a new character rising from the old. I haven't really gone into the other aspects of my life, but writing is something that I find really important. And it's something else that happens to be mostly centred around the activities of my brain.  So maybe it isn't so strange. After all ,when I write, I am in charge of everything. Nothing happens without my say so. There are no power outages, no short circuits. Everything happens for a reason, and it happens at its allotted time in the plot. I don't have that kind of control in real life any more.

Okay, so no one has that amount of control in real life. But I think the point still stands. I cling to my obsessive desire to know what happened and when because it represents my attempt to have the one thing I lack the most at the moment. Control.