The Seizure

The sharp and jagged pain to the rear of my tongue really only emerged as I half-sat, half-lay on a hospital bed-cum-trolley in the corridor adjacent to the A&E department. Affixed to the bed by an as yet unexplained fatigue, I was also gingerly resuming acquaintance with most of my autonomic responses. It’s worth mentioning that at roughly the same time that the pain climbed its own scale of discomfort, I alighted upon the collected tombstone silhouettes of the hospital trolleys’ bed heads.

It was a strange and yet delicate sensation as flaps of skin flit over the surface of my teeth, as if an errant piece of food had become stuck there. Despite the general viscosity of the skin on our tongues, it is nonetheless tautly affixed to the organ itself – as with any other part of our upper dermis. Alongside this ailment, one of the fingers on my left hand had swollen slightly in direct physical counterpoint to the pain emanating from it. My calves too were stiff and sore. I was bedevilled by numerous sources and types of pain, each unique to the limb, protuberance or digit that was its source.

My lips felt dry, and the skin on my face rather pinched. I could almost feel the friction of my eyelids against the surface of my eyes. My brain felt as if it had shrunk to a quarter of its size, and was now bashing around my parched skull. The resultant headache was the one ailment directly medicated during the course of my hospital visit, as the young doctor attending me dispensed a pair of clunky, chalky aspirin.

I had been relatively lucid – or: recently returned to lucidity – for about an hour by this stage, and had talked at length to the paramedics who retrieved and admitted me. Had the doctor examining me not queried as to whether I had bitten my tongue, there is every chance that I would not have volunteered it. As it was, this was apparently – no pun intended – the clincher so far as my diagnosis was concerned. The pain, over a week later, was still occasionally sharp and severe depending on the temperature of the food imbibed.

The confusion that I was most definitely still in recovery from could be cured only by insight, and the reflection afforded me by memory. How exactly did I end up here…?

A couple of hours earlier, in the back of an ambulance, a male voice had demanded, “Do you know why you’re here?” fairly insistently. He repeated the question, primed no doubt by my vacant demeanour, for little in the way of insight from the patient.

This brief interrogation gave way to a minor personal reverie as I took in the apparatus surrounding me. It is often claimed of Presidential (and Prime-Ministerial) bunkers that such is the infrastructural network contained within, whole wars can be waged and managed from one. Ambulances may be constrained by their dimensions, but the sheer variety of ailments and conditions that they are equipped to deal with – to staunch, to splint, to revive – is never far from one’s attention, no matter the state of confusion one might be in.

“Do. You. Know. Why. You’re. Here?” A female voice this time, though less questioning than designed to command my errant focus – the explanation hot on its heels: “You were found running around in circles; you didn’t know where you were/what you were doing.”

I continued to glance between the faces of the (three, in total) paramedics, my gaze alighting on some tube or tourniquet. I may at this point have mumblingly interjected that I did not indeed know, or that I didn’t understand. The fact was that I didn’t understand anything that was happening. One faceless soul volunteered the fact that many runners wear bands or some form of neck-wear bearing details of any prevailing health ‘issues,’ or emergency contact details. This catalysed my own sense of alarm, and momentarily sharpened my focus.

“This has never happened before,” I stammered, or something to this effect. I padded around my midriff for possessions that I must presumably have left the flat with. Reassured by the percussive jangle of my house keys, I told them my name, and there was a palpable release of tension. I am addressed as ‘Scott’ where previously I was but a nameless and wholly unwilling convict of unexplained circumstance.

Am I a student? Do I have a job? What do I do for a living? Am I supposed to be at work just now?

The sheer variety of likely, and probable, responses to these queries returned me to mass-confusion. How many were put to me by the paramedics, and which merely flitted across my mind, I cannot at this stage recall with any confidence. Before long, it was deemed appropriate to take me to A&E, and I readily complied.

As a regular runner, it is easy for various jaunts to simply blend into one. By dint of their number and steady accumulation there is, for each run, a stealth to their various quirks and features; they are, though, all different. Even if one deploys the same route, one is unlikely to feel the same, or to run at an identical pace and time. My run that day was notable in that I only managed to cover the first couple of kilometres of a (planned) longer run…

Back in the ambulance, lunacy jockeyed with lucidity on the journey to the hospital. There were snatched conversations with the two female paramedics about running in general, and races ran and entered, interspersed with snippets of recollection and reflection as to the event which instigated my own admittance.

The paramedic who squired me from the ambulance to the entrance of the Accident and Emergency department stated that the couple who had found me claimed I was speaking “gibberish – as if a foreign language.” I assured her that I speak no other language fluently, though these comments did fleetingly raise the possibility that my episode may have afforded me a savant-like, near-perfect command of a foreign tongue.

The clinical aroma that shrouds one’s apperception of the frailty on show lingers in the memory. One wonders if actual doctors and nurses can ever completely free themselves from this psychological anchor. Appropriately enough, it is this smell that attends my own memory of the mooted diagnosis: I had suffered a seizure roughly ten minutes after leaving home. A relatively healthy person, I had never previously battled any health issue beside the odd tweak or strain as befits/befalls the average runner. Suddenly I was on an altogether less secure footing so far as my own health and functioning were concerned.

There is a hallucinogenic aspect to my recollections of the seizure itself. I can remember brief impressions and sensations that flitted across my mind’s eye (or mind’s ear; or mind’s extremity) though they are mere synaesthesic snapshots that defy any attempt at re-ordering or channelling into some kind of storyline. There were flashes of light; the brush of a branch (or bush) as my hand mis-gropes in attempting to break a fall; voices of others eliding with my mumbled replies.

Back in A&E, now ensconced in a room of my own, I was permitted a moment of privacy to relieve myself. Having taken on a fair bit of water during the course of the day, my bladder was now full; mercifully so, I ought to add: it is not uncommon for minor bouts of incontinence to afflict the seizure patient. This aspect of my hydration levels was at odds with my other symptoms as various muscles seemed to be on the verge of cramping up. A vial of my blood was ferried away for analysis, and I occupied myself by pacing around my temporary commode in my hospital gown – a loose-fitting, backless number.

Alone for a while, I attempted to re-gather the scattered jigsaw pieces of memory. When attempting to imprint a timeline on otherwise abstract sensations, the logical step is – as with frayed wool or thread – to look for a starting point. I can just about remember walking out the door at the foot of my stairwell, I think. Was I recalling That Day’s exit, or merely another identikit run? I would like to think that I can recall jogging downhill onto the walkway beside the River Kelvin. But these final, pre-seizure and ‘conscious’ steps are sufficiently embedded to preclude divorcing any one instance from the multitude.

One is left instead with piecing together the story from the shards of recollection that emerged from this shattering of sanity, and attempting to weave backwards from the tendrils of impressions that occurred in the ambulance and, later on, in the hospital.

Shortly before being discharged, an elderly female patient and I were afforded the luxury of a visit to the TV area where Question Time was showing. My concentration had not yet recovered to normal levels, though I would, without hesitation, question the holistic appeal of the political squabbling on show. I was eventually released with an assurance that I could expect to be referred to a seizure clinic. At home, in bed, weariness and an adrenal exhilaration were my companions as I lay awake, my psyche like a fist recently clenched, though eventually relaxed; mercifully fatigued by the effort spent.