Without ever really realizing it until almost 11pm last night (July 16th 2008), yesterday marked the second anniversary of the catastrophic incident that left me forever changed. Without really dwelling too much on the physical outcome, the sheer absurdity of the after effects that rocketed around in my brain like aftershocks is more worth discussing. Most significantly because they were not real. Allow me a little room to preface this, and then I will get to the hilarious meat of the matter.
June 16th, 2008 I had a gran-mal seizure while shopping in the frozen food section of the local Kroger’s grocery. I was walking down the aisle and I caught my reflection in the freezer door glass as I turned the corner. I made eye contact with my reflected self’s eyes, and the reflected me stopped while the real me continued to walk. The last thing I remember was walking forward, looking back at my now stationary reflection in the glass, thinking, “wow! How the hell did I do that?” Twenty-two minutes later I woke up on the floor with an oxygen mask on and paramedics beginning to come into focus, asking me questions in a language I couldn’t yet understand. A blinding pain began to radiate from my pelvic area and into my mid-back. It would seem that as a result of my flopping and twitching like a flounder tossed upon a muddy bank I had managed to break a vertebrae in my back, T5 to be precise, as well as the biggest bone in my body at it’s thickest point. The greater trochanter of my femur was nearly splintered in two. I have seen this particular bone described as a “quadrilateral eminence”, a term that I like to use when describing my now apparent limp. “Eric, why ever do you limp so?” People may ask. And I respond to wit in a very exaggerated southern gentleman drawl, “Why I seem to have fractured my quadrilateral eminence some time ago, I do declare!” It always sounded better than I had a giant-ass seizure as a result of my own moronic and self-destructive pill habit. The result of this series of unfortunate events was a trip to the ER to have my left leg reattached to my body. Followed by 12 days of partial paralysis, post-seizure psychosis, and a marathon of “The Deadliest Catch” for 3 days straight that made the psychosis extremely unique and interesting, to say the least.
“Why” You may ask? How is it a perfectly healthy 34 year old man with no history of seizures suddenly just, well, had one equivalent to a 9.4 cerebral earthquake? mid-life epilepsy? Post-concussive seizure disorder? No and no. Just a short-circuit. A glitch in the matrix brought on by complicated dose of chemistry 101.
I had been prescribed an anti-convulsant medication called Depakote ER. It is also gaining popularity as a mood stabilizer in people who are cyclothemic bipolar, a misdiagnosis I had received while vacationing at a chemical dependency rehab the prior September. When you first start taking it, it is like a Jacob’s ladder going off inside your head whenever you close your eyes, especially when you try to go to sleep. It alters your brain chemistry to try to balance out the imbalance that brought you to pharmaceutical solutions in the first place. Like lithium, it is rapidly metabolized in the blood stream, often resulting in constantly increased dosages to obtain the same effect over time. When I was taken off it, I was up to 2500mg / day, the maximum dosage. I switched doctors, who also told me that the medication wasn’t going to work, and changed everything I was prescribed. I stopped taking Depakote cold turkey. The problem with that is, you CAN’T stop taking an anti-convulsant cold turkey because it will bring about the very thing it was designed to prevent. A giant fucking seizure.
In the days building up to it, I started to feel more and more disconnected from reality. Sleep became impossible. I felt like my brain was trying to suck my spinal fluid out by using my spine as a straw. I could feel it vibrating behind my eyes. My head was wrapped in cellophane and when people spoke to me it all sounded like the adults on The Peanuts cartoons. I thought that the best thing to do was to counter these effects by medicating as heavily as possible. During this period in my life, that was the canned response to everything. Knees hurt? Medicate it. Feeling sad? Medicate it. Can’t find your car keys? Medicate. The new Doc has prescribed me alazapram, 3mg per day. I know, right? Now is when I feel compelled to introduce you to a concept I call “junkie logic” and it’s sidekick “junkie math”. It has to do with the rationalization of real world things in terms of how someone with an addiction will manipulate them to use to our advantage. Oh yeah, “Hi. I’m Eric and I am an addict. My drug of choice was pills. Any kind, and in ridiculous amounts” I am required to use that qualifying statement from now on as a recovering addict. It’s in the contract. I don’t make the rules, but I now chose to abide by them. But I digress…
Now, with that qualifier in mind, and having full working knowledge of it vis-à-vis confessional one-on-one session, this man STILL prescribed me 90 1mg tablets of Xanax. That is the equivalent of giving a morbidly obese person tickets to a deep fried Twinkie buffet. You might as well hand both of us a loaded gun, because nothing good is going to come of this, nothing at all. The tempest brewing in between my ears was beginning to reach a feverish crescendo when I applied “junkie logic” and decided it was time to medicate. Can’t sleep? Medicate. Feel like a small amphitheater of people is simultaneously reading all 26 chapters of The Catcher In The Rye inside your head, and in different languages? Medicate. Stressed out about how the overall effect of this was having an effect on my job? Medicate. Medicate, medicate, and medicate. Medicate to the tune of 90 alazapram in 15 days. This is where junkie math kicks in. if 3 per day are good, then 6 or more per day must be great! This stuff doesn’t cure any of the problems I was having with sleep, stress, and the cacophony of chatter in my head that was to be the built up to the seizure. It was rather like icing smeared across a very hideous cake. It didn’t fix a damn thing, it just filled in holes with its “sweet escape” goodness. This is the same junkie math that compelled me to utter, “do you know how many pills I can buy with $500?” to the admission nurse at the Prevention and Recovery center I voluntarily admitted myself into the previous year when she told much how much my insurance deductible was. Rehab at that time just taught me how to be a BETTER junkie, because I wasn’t ready to quit for real, I just wanted people to think so to get them off my ass. I went in taking Loracet and beer, and a month after getting out I was taking Oxycodone and absinthe. It was like a junkie informational bazaar. Again I digress…
In the hospital, my left leg was successfully reattached using screws, rods, and pins and copious amounts of morphine, dilaudid, and tramadol. This suited my opiate receptors just fine. They were like Agustus Gloop swimming in a river of chocolate. Pristinely tickled shitless. Being prone on my back and nodding in and out, reading or computer usage wasn’t an easy endeavor, lest I wake up drooling into the keyboard of my HP Pavilion… again. So I opted for TV, and more to the point (finally you rambling bastard!) a marathon of “Deadliest Catch”. You see, my over active mind in a opiate induced demi-glaze took the sea faring nautical theme, and planted it as the seed of my post-seizure psychosis that was fueled by rapid benzodiazapene withdrawal. As the stronger opiates were gradually tapered away, much to my chagrin, they were replaced with standard hydrocodone painkillers. In laymen’s terms, this is the equivalent of going from looking for a way out of the woods with a halogen floodlight, to using a single element gas lantern. Both can be used for the same thing, but the former is a hell of a lot more intense on the light spectrum! Regaining feeling, let alone motion in my leg was taking longer than expected, and after 7 days I was discharged in a wheelchair. Now my wife was for the most part, fit and healthy, but by no means could she hoist my immobilized and partially paralyzed self from a chair into a bed, and vice versa. For this, we solicited the kindness of my next door neighbor with whom we had recently befriended. As I lie in bed for hours upon hours at a time, by myself while my wife ran the rest of the household in my absence, my grip on reality began to erode. Slowly, methodically, I began to formulate a rationale for what had happened and put me into this dire predicament. Calypso, the goddess of the sea. It had to be! It was the only thing that made sense. She had sounded the call for all sailors to take to the sea, and I had ignored it. For this I was to be stricken down with rickets and then driven mad. The rickets explained my bones shattering like glass, so stage one was already complete. I then asserted that Calypso had placed a curse on my ship (house), and there would be a sign on board that indicated just this fact. Something, a charm, and artifact located on the windward side at present course, far aft and on the port side. Sure enough after screaming obscenities at my wife and neighbor from my wheelchair on the back porch, he found it. A bamboo pole about 2” in diameter with a shot of rope tied to it in the back corner of the yard. Alas! We must destroy it! I was convinced that the messengers put it there. The messengers were a rock band that only played their summoning music for the same audience of followers in an abandoned Captain D’s restaurant with the windows blacked out to keep the non-believers from looking in. Gene Simmons was an original member, but wanted to write music and tour so they kicked him out. I was to be given 3 tests, and if I passed them I would be freed from Calypso’s curse never to be harmed by it again. This was all revealed to me while watching The Secret of Nimh on the living room TV, from my bedroom 30 feet away…. The TV was on in the living room and I could see it from the bed, but I couldn’t hear it. My sub-conscious made up the filler in a post seizure psychotic state and I was convinced of its reality without a doubt. Needless to say after 3 days of this my wife called the shrink at 11pm on the third day and explained what was going on. He diagnosed it as post seizure psychosis, coupled with a dangerous withdrawal from the alazapram, and prescribed a Librium taper that served kind of like a “control-alt-delete” for my haywire mental state. After 48 hours of Exorcism-like heavy breathing unconsciousness, I woke up feeling refreshed and asked the people gathered around my bed, mouths all agape, if I could have a glass of tea.
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