the beginning, the seizures...

last tuesday, i was in a cab on my way to a lunch meeting with my boss and two of my coworkers. we had to make a detour so my boss could pick something up and i started to feel really dizzy. i thought it was motion sickness, so while my boss was running her errand, i got out of the cab to get some fresh air. we had stopped on a small hill, and i kept losing my footing and stumbling a bit. i had gotten motion sickness enough times to know that this was unusual. my boss came back, and thinking that the feeling would pass, i got back in the cab. we made it about 4 blocks up the road and i was feeling increasingly nauseous and light-headed, so i asked the cab driver to let me out and i told my co-workers that i would just walk the rest of the way (it was about a 20 block walk to our destination, but all i could think at that point was that i wanted out of the car) and meet them there. i got out, feeling incredibly out of it and dizzy, and called stean, just because i felt so awful and needed to tell someone. i probably spent a minute or two on the phone with him and then the right side of my body started to twitch so i hung up. my co-workers had gotten out of the cab and had come back to check on me. i got really nervous--my right leg, arm, and eye were all twitching like mad and my peripheral vision on my right side started to tunnel and flash, as if someone were holding a strobe light directly at the side of my head. my head was spinning, everyone was asking me if i was okay, if i was hungry, if i wanted to sit down, if i wanted to go to the hospital (coincidentally enough, we were a block away from a hospital). someone ran off to get me something to eat. i sat down on the ground and held on tenaciously to a fence to try and steady myself. and that's the last thing i remember.

i regained consciousness in the emergency room wearing a hospital gown, with a plastic hospital id bracelet on my wrist, an IV in my arm, and electrodes on my chest. i have never in my life felt such fear. i had no recollection of how i had gotten there or where i had been before. it was as if i had just come into existence at that moment. i was very awake very quickly. one of the nurses called me by name and told me that i had just had a seizure. i started crying. i didn't have seizures. i've never had seizures. it just wasn't possible. he asked me if i knew what day and year it was. i had no idea. i stared at him, trying desperately to pull that information out of my head, but i honestly didn't know. it was such a simple question, but i couldn't answer him. he told me that it was march 23rd, 2004 and that it's very normal to come out of a seizure feeling disoriented and confused and that i would start to feel like myself soon. but i was so afraid. i didn't recognize anyone around me.

i settled down, and my co-workers were allowed into the ER to see me. i made sure that someone called stean and my dad. stean got to the hospital quickly. things seemed okay for a bit, but then i started to get the "aura" that i had earlier in the day, before my seizure. sure enough, i went into a second seizure, after which they loaded me up with IV dilantin and a sedative which pretty much put me out for the rest of the afternoon. because of the second seizure, i was admitted to the hospital so some tests could be run to figure out what was going on.