Apocalypse

(1995)

What is that noise? 

 

I drag myself from my disconnected dreams to discern the clicking, squeaking, swallowing noise over my shoulder. 

 

Oh no!! He's getting ready to puke in our bed! 

 

As I throw the covers off and start to flee for a container, I look over my shoulder and am horrified to see my little son laying on his side, eyes rolled back in his head, swallowing in a way that makes my heart stop. 

 

Oh my God! He's having a seizure- “Tony!!! Wake up! He's having a seizure!!”

I look on in heart thumping alarm until he returns to the angelic slumber of my sweet little boy, then stumble into the bathroom. The accusatory words of an acquaintance swim through my head: “How can you even think of having kids?” 

My world is spinning in shadow as I grip the edge of the sink and my distraught psyche is screaming NONONONONO!!! This can't be happening. This could not be happening twice in the same family. There is no way in hell God would make us go through this again. Please God no. please God not again this cannot be happening. 

 

I return, dazed, to the bedroom. In utter panic, I stare at my little boy so sound asleep. He is in the altered state of consciousness that a person enters after experiencing an epileptic seizure, and will not wake up. 

My husband says, “that wasn't a seizure, that couldn't have been a seizure.” He is a doctor for crying out loud and I want to slap him out of his denial.

“Are you kidding me,” I wail. “If that was not a seizure what was it? That was a seizure! My sweet little boy had a seizure! How can this be happening.”

Flash back to 1971.

In the middle of a sentence, there occurs a snowy disconnect. Like that of the radio between stations. Nary a thought can penetrate this blizzard.

Clarity returns.  “Where have you been?”

“Nowhere.”

“That can't be. You must have been thinking about something.... Unless something is terribly wrong.” 

 

“I am terribly wrong. A huge mistake.”

 

It all starts with the angst of a lost fourteen year-old, uprooted from childhood, and bearing the weight of an alcoholic mother. Seized by depression and lack of belonging, she is flagged by her parents as troubled. Help is sought in the form of pastoral counseling. 

 

She begrudgingly attends these sessions and not wanting to disappoint, gropes for an explanation worthy of such parental concern. But nothing comes, for there is no explanation.  She has come unplugged. An oddity among her peers. Assumptions are made. The mutterings ripple through the community.

“There's something wrong with her.”

“Maybe she's crazy.”

“She must be on drugs.”

Finally, to her tearful relief, a diagnosis is made. Epilepsy. Not crazy. 

 

She is perpetually enveloped by a black cloud of impending doom, the precursor to the devastating and unpredictable storms within her brain. Following her disoriented wanderings, she reclaims herself: misplaced, bruised, broken- in the middle of a field, a strange neighborhood, a busy thoroughfare, at the foot of a long flight of stairs,...

The situation continues to worsen, waves of terror drowning her, dashing her against soul crushing rocks... Over and over and over and over again. 

 

She resurfaces gasping, in gut wrenching sobs as an avalanche of people is squashing the life out of her, and the realization that it has happened again washes over her. 

 

Such a spectacle: flashing lights, sirens screaming, the attendants joke, “we have to stop meeting like this” as she is swathed and strapped onto the gurney. The dramatic composition of this scene is so redundant. Only this time, there is blood remaining from a horrible car accident which had claimed the life of a friend's brother only minutes before. The swinging IV and swaying shelves of bandages and equipment begin to recede, as the now familiar EMT calls to the driver from an elongated distance, “Here she goes again!” 

 

She comes to in the gleaming sterility of the emergency room as repeated attempts are made to get a new IV in. “I'm not finding a thing.” “ I got one into her knuckle the last time- try that”. The exhausted doctor rushes in, the whole scene looping over and over in endless repetition. As her surroundings recede once again, a white shadow slips past the periphery of her vision, a wraith holding the ultimate weapon against these apocalyptic brain storms that seize her in endless grips of terror. Relief is at hand, yet she begs them not to do it; obliteration by Syringe is far worse. At least between these assaults inflicted by her faulty brain, there is a friendly face, some witty attempt to alleviate the terrible gravity of the situation. 

 

But it is too late. The Syringe plunges her into a deep black hole of non-existence...

*****

5 years later... 

The activity in nocturnal I.C.U. is in itself like a weird dream- a series of surreal and medicated distortions. The person in the cubicle next to her codes that night and as her neighbor is tended to, she lapses into a hallucination in which she has been kidnapped and is being held in the back of an ambulance. If her parents don't come up with the $200 ransom within four days, the slow drip poison in her I.V. will kill her. In the wake of her room mate's death, the nurses, Anna, Judy, Patti and Wally, celebrate with a bubble dance in anticipation of her pending execution. So surreal are they in their blue surgical garb as they bobbed in and out of view, their distorted voices burbling through the medicated fog that envelopes her. The stench of terror at her pending death fills her bed with sweat.

Morning dawns with beautiful, clear skies and the rattle of breakfast trays. She is moved to the spot next to the large plate glass window, vacated the previous night by her unfortunate neighbor. She gazes at a pair of crows soaring about over field and forest, laughing at her as she imagines their household busily preparing for her sister's graduation that afternoon. 

 

Sylvia is the nurse caring for her that day. The nurse removes the untouched breakfast tray and with unusual sternness admonishes her to get cleaned up. She sits in the sweat drenched bed draped in IV tubes, watching the “bath” water turn cold and feeling completely sorry for herself.

"Come on now. I don't have time for this." The nurse is busy and has other patients to tend to. The girl is expecting a visit from her older brother and sister who have come for their sister's graduation, and the nurse is getting annoyed.

Sylvia just gets the bath materials cleared away and drapes a clean sheet over the girl's scantily clad body, when her older brother and sister appear from behind her right shoulder. Then her two younger sisters come from behind her left. Mom and Dad from the right. Friends Andy and Mary from the left. Bill and Jay from the right. Mr. & Mrs. Correll, the family's minister and his wife, left. John and Pinky, right. Ellen's social studies teacher, Mr. Bessey, and Dr. Sanzenbacher. Finally, the nurses from all shifts who had cared for her during these last impossible months, as a mortar board is placed like a crown on her astonished head. 

 

*****

Note: When I was going through my own epileptic hell as a teen, an extensive battery of tests had presumably determined that my seizures were the result of the lack of oxygen during a febrile convulsion I suffered at the age of two. A part of my brain was atrophied and this shrunken lobe was identified as the focal point of my seizures. 

 

The presumption had been that my children would not inherit the catastrophic disorder . Presumably my children would grow up in relative normalcy, without the overwhelming fear and anger and guilt and helplessness and sense of abandonment that had wreaked devastation upon my family of origin... 

Thankfully, the type of epilepsy my son was later diagnosed with is Benign Rolandic Epilepsy, a type that happens only during sleep and only in childhood. We passed through this period relatively unscathed. 

RDW (2-3-10)