Let me start out by saying that epilepsy is no laughing matter. It is a serious condition that is hard on the people who live with it and the people that live with them. I don’t share this story because epilepsy is funny. I share it because my reaction to it is funny.
My wife had seizures as a child up until about 6 or 7. She outgrew them and didn’t have any until sometime in the late 1980s after we were married. She woke me up in the middle of the night and she was convulsing. I had been through 1st aid training a few months before this and had been trained on how to deal with someone having a seizure. I did everything wrong. They train you to roll them on their side to prevent them from choking if they throw up. I rolled her on her back. They train you not to try to put anything between their teeth to keep them from biting their tongue. They will usually bite their tongue anyway and you might lose a finger. I was trying to pry her mouth open. I got up and called the ambulance service. We lived in just a few blocks from the ambulance station so I thought they would be able to respond quickly. All the ambulances were out on call. I told the dispatcher to send someone as soon as they could. She continued to convulse for what seemed like hours but I’m sure it was just a few minutes. Then she stopped and she tensed up. She started breathing heavily and was snorting when she inhaled. Her eyes occasionally opened and they rolled back in her head. This is the point where started thinking that she was possessed by the devil. I have seen too many demon possession movies to be cool while something like this was happening. The lights had been out in our bedroom up to this point. I turned them on at that point to keep any evil spirits lurking around in our bedroom from jumping into my body. At least I would be able to see it when it did happen.
After a few minutes of this, her body went limp. I thought she was dead. I was over her in the bed and screamed her name at her face. She opened her eyes and stared at me with a look of terror in her face. Her mouth opened and it looked like she was about to scream when suddenly her eyes would close and she went limp again. I screamed at her again and I got the same reaction. Later she told me she remembered this and didn’t know who I was. For some reason, I assumed she was back to normal and that she didn’t need medical attention. I called the ambulance service and told them not to come. This probably wasn’t what needed to happen and she did go to the doctor later that day. I blame my bad decision making on the fact that I had never dealt with this before and was totally exhausted. I got back in bed and about 5 minutes later my alarm clock went off. It was time to get up and go to work.
The fact that I got up with the intention of going to work like nothing had happened that night shows that my thinking was not that clear that morning. At that time, my morning routine was to go to our kitchen and eat breakfast, then shower and get dressed for work. I was at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal when my wife came into the kitchen and said, “The bed is just like supper”. I said “What?!?” She replied, “It’s all wet; it’s just like supper”. I went and checked the bed and it was wet. She wet the bed at some point during the seizure. It is not unusual for this to happen when people having seizures. I was still confused by what she said. My first thought was that it was some kind in inside joke with her family that she had never told me about before. Although we had dated for a long time and had been married a couple of years, I thought it was possible that there were still some family stories that I had not been told about.
I went to take my morning shower. Because we lived in an older house that didn’t have an air vent in the bathroom, I cracked open the bathroom door after my shower to help the room un-fog. While I was drying off, thought about what my wife had said while I was eating breakfast and I yelled into the other room “Hey, I’m just like supper!”. She came in and said “What?!?” She had no idea what I was talking about. Obviously when she came into the kitchen earlier, her brain still wasn’t firing on all cylinders correctly. It was working better now and good enough that we could make good decisions like going to see a doctor later that day. The doctors ran several tests but found nothing that could be treated. She remained seizure-free until several months later as we prepared to go on a trip to visit her mother in San Antonio.
