Hey, guys! It’s been a long time since I posted here. I’m not great at keeping up a blog, but I’d like to try again.
I do have some things to update you about. For the last two and a half years, I’ve been dealing with panic attacks and anxiety. It started suddenly, with no warning and no explanation as to what was causing it. So I had to work through living with that while also keeping up my freelance work, then my part time job as secretary at my church, and writing my books.
I learned to live with it. I was taking medicine when I needed to and I had seen a therapist to talk through some things that might have been causing my anxiety. It had gotten a lot better. I was rarely having anxiety or the panic attacks. I had even gotten a new full-time job working as a graphic designer for my local hospital, a job that I really enjoy. Things looked great.
And then on November 10, I woke up at 2:30am to find my husband and two EMTs standing over me as I lay in bed. B, my husband, said, “You’ve been having seizures for the last 15 minutes. We’re going to the hospital.”
Um, what? I couldn’t talk yet and I was confused about what he was saying, but my first thought was, “No, I haven’t. I’ve been sleeping!”
But we went to the hospital–the same hospital that I now work at and had just spent eight hours working in the day before–and they put me in the emergency room. I realized my tongue really hurt and a doctor determined I had bitten it hard, a sign of a seizure. I was already coming out of the seizures by the time the EMTs got to my house, so they couldn’t verify that I was having them. The hospital put me in observation and kept me overnight. Sometime that next night, I woke up to go to the bathroom and thought, “Why do I have this oxygen tube in my nose?” The bed started squealing, waking my husband up from his bed in the uncomfortable chair in the corner. I asked, “Why is the bed making all that noise?”
“You had another seizure,” B told me. As far as I knew, I had been sleeping all night without any issues. I don’t remember anything at all about the seizures and never had any warning that they were coming on.
I also don’t have any explanations as to why I’m having seizures. I am now on anti-seizure medication and I’m seeing a neurologist. My MRI and CT scans were both clear, so there are no tumors, thank God! My EEG did show seizure activity, so we just need to figure out why. I’ve been diagnosed with epilepsy, which is basically seizures with no known cause. I haven’t had a seizure since that night at the hospital, not that I know of anyway. I slept through the other seizures, so I probably wouldn’t know if I was having more in my sleep. B hasn’t woken up to find me in one since then though. On December 10, I wrote this on my personal Facebook page:
One month ago today, B woke up to find me in a grand mal seizure. I haven’t had one since that night when I had another grand mal seizure while in the hospital, but it’s still been a frustrating month! I can’t drive for another 5 months–as long as I don’t have anymore seizures. We still have no idea why this happened. I find myself forgetting things a lot–forgetting to do things or forgetting simple words or forgetting what I was saying while speaking. I don’t know if it’s the epilepsy, the medication, or just the fact that I’m in my mid-30s now, ha. I’ve had several episodes of my brain just not processing words I’m hearing. Someone will be speaking to me and suddenly I can hear the words, but I don’t understand them. It only lasts a few seconds and then my brain is working like it should again. I go back to the neurologist in a month and hopefully he’s gotten the EEG results from the hospital so he can see what is going on. In the meantime, I am reading about epilepsy and memory problems: http://www.epilepsy.com/…/thinking-an…/types-memory-problems
There are good things, though. My sweet babies, Cheddar and Taffy, two of the kittens we found in our backyard this summer and have nursed and raised:
And I have a new book coming out in February! The Truth About Boys, the third book in the Stolen Kiss series.
