im sorry, just how you were diagnosed and how your experience has evolved....
I'll be delighted Cerindipiti.
The story begins in the middle. In my thirties - the nineties - after much angst and toil I'd learned Japanese and gotten an MBA and a cool job at a Japanese auto co HQ, where billionaires in Europe considered it their business to return my calls within the hour.
However, it's really necessary to have a command of one's numbers, and a recall for faces, names and events to work at any company, most particularly a Japanese company. So at last in 1995 I give up the ghost and leave the co, and after a year of further fruitless entrepreneurial struggles in Tokyo, return to the US to look for help.
There is no help to be had in the US - except from my blessed brother - for a bit, before he decided I was ill because I didn't want to be well and wrought a campaign of persecution that set me homeless for the next ten years.
Fast forward past many doctors and diagnoses and a lot of desperate poverty, and we come to 2006 - my new neurologist's office. My jaw has just dropped upon hearing that the EEG turned up Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. I'd no idea. I equated "epilepsy" with grand mal seizures. (Soon after I found housing.)
So then the question "how did this happen?" comes up. I recall a bike-auto accident when I was five, and that I was knocked unconscious. Thought that was it until I talked to my Ma, who has no recollection of any bike accident but still burns with the memory of my lips turning blue after she brought me home from the pediatrician at about the same age. My doctor dad saw what was what when he came home and whisked me off to the hospital.
I had a tracheotomy that night, and all seemed well thereafter, of course, for erratic behavior and memory issues through childhood. These prompted a high school teacher to write a comment about my "unique scattered approach" that unnerved me through early adulthood, but which I eventually passed off as an idiosyncrasy. Thing is, my work life was always rocky, and my social life uncomfortable.
I've been blessed with many gifts, but I feel like a three-legged dog trying to run with the rest. I am SO eager to get over this. If. If only.
I'd thought my troubles over when I picked up my first anti-seizure meds. That was over three years ago. I had no idea I could hang on this long. Funny what life learns ya.
So that is the story. Thank you for asking.
Cerendipiti, everyone, what's your story?
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