Maya Schenwar during a recent
hospital visit. (Photo: Maya Schenwar)
On a warm, breezy afternoon in early September 2004,
I was leaning back on my elbows on a grassy hill in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania,
eating a cheese sandwich off a plastic tray, chatting with a couple of
classmates. It was the beginning of my senior year of college, and we were
already dizzy with happy anxiety. I turned my face upward and watched a white
streak of sun shoot down across the canopy of the sky, dry grass prickling
through my sandals.
But as I stared, that streak of sun kept coming,
straight at me. I swallowed and couldn’t swallow; I was gulping at stars; I was
outside my skin, watching my own face as it radiated, swirling galactically.
And then I was lying flat and rolling backward, a million faces hanging over
mine, staring down, their hands on my arms, my face. And then the faces slid
together - there were only ten or seven or five faces, though I couldn’t catch
hold of words like “ten” or “seven” or “five.”
“What’s your name?” a white-masked face said, into my
eyes.
“I don’t know,” I said back. The “me” outside of
myself was flailing: “Thinking of words is my thing!” that “me” thought.
“Who am I if I can’t say words?” I thought the word “vegetable.”
But a few minutes later, the words rushed back. When
the paramedics asked me what month it was and what country we were in, I got
the answers right. My head was mine again, albeit aching like crazy. Yet the
left temporal lobe of my brain had, apparently, reared up and announced its
eccentricities, and it wouldn’t be shutting up anytime soon. My epilepsy had
made its debut.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, who also had temporal lobe epilepsy, described his protagonist’s seizure experience in
The Idiot:
He remembered that he always had one minute just
before the epileptic fit when suddenly, in the midst of sadness, spiritual
darkness and oppression, there seemed at moments a flash of light in his brain,
and with extraordinary impetus, all his vital forces suddenly began working at
their highest tension. The sense of life, the consciousness of self, were
multiplied ten times at these moments, which passed like a flash of lightning.
His mind and heart were flooded with extraordinary light.... But these moments,
these flashes, were only the prelude of that final second in which the fit
began.
Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin likened these “flashes”
to “the highest form of existence” and “the acme of harmony and beauty.”
Well, my moment of oneness with the sun (my “aura,”
as it’s called) may have been glorious, but the less-mystical reality of the
seizure that hit me that September afternoon wasn’t harmonious or beautiful
(especially when I looked at myself in the hospital mirror afterward and
noticed I’d drooled all over my face and hands, and probably those of anyone
who’d been helping me). Neither were the headache and shame that followed me
around in the days afterward. I visited a string of neurologists over the next
few years, lost my driving privileges intermittently, and was quickly
prescribed a medication regimen that keeps my seizures in check most of the
time.
When I do seize, unlike Dostoevsky, I do not tend to
topple into radiant epiphany or collapse from the sheer force of my own
ecstatic, perfect, devastating cosmic comprehension.
Instead, I blank out on a ratty couch in my old
basement apartment in Chicago, or the shopping mall food court, or (eek!)
emerging from a panel presentation at the Americans for Democratic Action
convention, and wake up to find the paramedics touching my head and asking me
questions like, “Who’s the president of the United States?” and “Do you know
how to write your name?” Once in a while, I don’t know how to write my name.
And then there’s the other, less dramatic stuff - the
“abnormal activity” buzzing around my brain on “normal” days. Since I had my
first seizure, that “me” who floated outside myself and saw a separate version
of reality has never really gone away. When I’m not concentrating hard on
something - an engaging conversation, a good book, a challenging project, my
fast-paced job, an adorable dog, an extremely delicious sandwich - I’m
sometimes flooded with a feeling of “derealization.” The world around me
appears like a dream, or a movie, or a secondhand vision: a matrix inside a
matrix. Sometimes, the world wiggles. At times, I think I’m seeing the
fundamental unreality of things as they really are, as in the Hindu concept of “Maya,”
in which the physical world is an illusion or projection that must be seen through
in order to achieve enlightenment.... And at times, I just want to go to bed.
Two weeks ago, after a recent flare-up, I was
admitted into the hospital for an extended video-monitored electroencephalogram
(EEG) to measure my brain’s epileptiform activity. I was forbidden from going
to the bathroom - or getting out of bed, for that matter - without paging a
nurse. I couldn’t sleep at night under the camera’s constant glare, the electric
nodes pulling at my hair and my neurons. I tried to work on my computer (you
know, for this political news web site), but was interrupted by a series of
doctors, residents and nurses asking me if I knew who the president of the
United States was. At one point, I replied “Lindsay Lohan,” just for kicks. I
went home with a glue-stained scalp, a report of “frequent spikes,” an
increased medication dosage and few answers.
Why am I telling you all this?
First of all, I really wanted to share this glamour
shot I took of myself in the hospital with my head tangled in wires (see
above). I think the cyborg-Medusa look could be the next runway hit.
More importantly, though: For a long time, I didn’t
want to tell anyone in my professional world about this unique feature of my
brain. On the topics-that-are-fun-to-disclose-in-the-workplace-o-meter,
epilepsy ranks somewhere between “I’ve been embezzling candy from the vending
machine for the past 15 years” and “I am actually a camel.” I was worried about
being viewed as an invalid, a workplace hazard, a weirdo. But above all, I was
afraid that people would see me as stupid.
In the 19th century (when Dostoevsky was pouring his
own experiences into the character of Prince Myshkin) and into the early 20th,
seizure-prone people were often categorized as “epileptic idiots,” and viewed as unable to function outside
of an institution. More than a hundred years later, the stigma’s still around.
A report last year in the journal Epilepsy and Behavior found
that social media have become a breeding ground for derogatory comments about
epilepsy: 41 percent of seizure-related tweets were deemed “offensive.”
Although nowadays, fewer folks view seizures as possession by the devil or evil
spirits (as many, many cultures have throughout history), the palpable discomfort
around the topic of epilepsy is pervasive - and it has tangible effects. Until
the 1970s, it was legal in the US to deny people with epilepsy access to
theaters and restaurants, and in China and India, epilepsy’s still an accepted
reason to annul a marriage. Workplace discrimination is prevalent, and people who have
epilepsy tend to earn less money than those who don’t. Consequently, there’s
a clear incentive to avoid telling anyone you’ve got epilepsy, if you can get
away with it.
“There is an ongoing, significant embarrassment level
about it,” the director of NYU’s Epilepsy Center told The New York Times, stating that “the feeling, for a lot of
people, is that it does carry a lot worse stigma than a cancer.” It follows
that most people with epilepsy don’t like to talk about their condition
publicly, and that, in turn, perpetuates the stigma ... which makes it a whole
lot more difficult to raise money for research and lobby for equal rights.
So, now I am telling all of you I have epilepsy. (I
have epilepsy!) If the director of an independent, progressive news
organization in which everyone works from home can’t say it, then how the hell
can we expect anyone else to?
The truth is, I am very, very, very, very, very,
very, very, very, very lucky. I am lucky to have had a swarm of
ridiculous-looking nodes glued to my head and for being temporarily banned from
going to the bathroom by myself, to assess my neuronal dysfunction. I’m lucky
to have had my insurance cover 75 percent of my brain tests, even though I’m
still paying thousands of sadly-forked-over dollars. I’m lucky to have those
dollars to pay, regardless of how sadly I’m forking them over. I’m unspeakably
lucky to have insurance at all. I’m lucky to occasionally experience a vague
sense that reality is eluding me, instead of simply dropping, convulsing and
endangering my life at a split-second’s notice, because I am lucky enough to be
able to obtain the medications that (usually) keep me from seizing.
Fifty
million people in the world have epilepsy. For 30 percent of them, their
seizures can’t be controlled by treatment. Beyond that, 75 percent of people in “developing countries” do not have
access to treatment in the first place.
In the United States alone, up to 50,000 people die
from seizure-related causes every year.
This past fall, the acclaimed British medical journal
The Lancet reported that the vast majority of epilepsy cases occur in low and
middle-income countries where treatment is scarce, and called for a “global campaign against epilepsy.”
It’s encouraging to see The Lancet issuing an
epilepsy-action cry to the world’s leaders. But a true “global campaign” must
start with each of us making our worlds more friendly to disclosure. That means
becoming conscious of epilepsy as a very common, albeit near-silent, reality.
It means including it in our disability advocacy efforts and awareness
campaigns (and, while we’re at it, curbing the seizure jokes on Twitter).
Today is European Epilepsy Day. It comes three days before the Feast
of St. Valentine, epilepsy’s patron saint. (Who knew?) Even if you don’t live
in Europe, you can celebrate! And what better way to celebrate than by checking
out the Epilepsy
Foundation’s web site to learn all about the condition, the people who have
it and the fight for effective treatment - and equal rights - for all?
Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin proclaimed of his
pre-seizure ecstasy, “Yes, for this moment, one might give one’s whole life!”
Much as I love Prince Myshkin, and much as I’ve learned
from my own moments of auratic bliss, I sure wouldn’t want to give up my life
(or my livelihood) for those few seconds - and I wouldn’t want anyone else to
have to give up theirs, either.
Let the global campaign begin!
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Maya Schenwar is Truthout’s editor-in-chief and the
author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We
Can Do Better. Follow her on Twitter @mayaschenwar.
Previously, she was a senior editor and reporter at
Truthout, writing on US defense policy, the criminal justice system, campaign
politics, and immigration reform. Prior to her work at Truthout, Maya was
contributing editor at Punk Planet magazine. She has also written for the Guardian,
In These Times, Ms. Magazine, AlterNet, Z Magazine, Bitch
Magazine, Common Dreams, the New Jersey Star-Ledger and others. She also
served as a publicity coordinator for Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Maya is
on the Board of Advisors at Waging Nonviolence.
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