Brain Storm
Your brain is made of a bunch of little things, and there’s constantly lightning going between them. These are scientific terms, by the way. The lightning is not at all random — it goes in very specific directions from one thing to another thing, and thanks to these things and the lightning you can breath and walk and talk and think about stuff, like how incredible it is that some child stars are able to stay sane in a world that attempts to crush them under capitalistic cultural consumption.
A doctor once told me that sometimes, but rarely, but sometimes, the lightning in your brain is not so intentional. Sometimes people get what’s called, scientifically, a lightning storm in their brain. When this happens, your ability to walk or talk or have conscious thought disappears. First it happens slowly, and then all at once: you’ll feel something akin to lightheadedness, but that’s not quite how you’d describe it, and you’ll recognize that something odd is going on and you’ll think, “this is weird, huh?” You might be looking at some words on your phone and want to use your phone to send words to people but suddenly the words don’t make sentences and even the letters don’t make words anymore. That’s when you realize something is really up, but at this point the parts of your brain in charge of being scared have already been overtaken by the storms, so you go peacefully into unknowing, and when you wake up your mom and your sister and a bunch of paramedics are in your room asking you questions.
The questions will be something like, “what day of the week is it?” or, “who’s the president?” and you’ll be able to answer questions like the latter but not the former. This is due to a scientific reason that I forgot. When you get to the hospital, things will finally start to make sense and a doctor or someone will tell you you’ve had a seizure and you’ll say, “oh, okay, thank you.” Your parents will tell you that they love you, and you’ll tell them you love them too. If you have good health insurance, you’ll be able to get some tests done and a doctor will explain to you the bit about the lightning in your brain and tell you everything’s fine but you should get more sleep, maybe. Then, when it happens again eight months later (you’ll be trying to crank out an essay in the library sometime around 8 PM, Your last thought will be “oh I know what this is”), they’ll give you more tests and find out that they don’t know what’s wrong with you, and they’ll give you a relatively common medication that helps out.
A political science professor who was really into the Greeks once told me that they used to believe seizures were a sign of divinity and that Alexander the Great used to get them. I don’t believe in divinity, but this idea makes me smile; I smiled when the professor told me this, and then I asked if I was OK to get an extension on that paper.
