In which Dean has a seizure and I'm not there.

Dean has epilepsy. I’ve known this as long as I’ve known Dean. 

The last seizure he had was five years ago, just after our two year anniversary. We’d had a busy weekend, gone to a concert, a ‘tear the house down’ party, and—unbeknownst to me—he wasn’t taking his medicine regularly. He had his reasons (they were bad reasons) but at least they were reasons that I could understand. His doctor had said something about how some people grow out of it and that the next time he talked to his neurologist, he should see what he thought about the possibility. Well, you can guess what happened.

Anyway, the experience was horrible. I blogged about it at the time. I never wanted to go through that again. And to an extent, I haven’t.

Dean took a trip on his own to see his family in Peoria last weekend and I stayed behind with the cats. I had coffee dates scheduled with friends every morning that he was going to be gone, the house was clean, Dean had even left me with flowers and some fun things to eat. It was gonna be a great weekend for both of us.

At my first coffee meet up, I got a call from Dean’s phone, but it wasn’t Dean.

A passenger sitting near him on his flight—thank you Michaela, wherever you are—witnessed him having a seizure and presumably alerted the airline staff as well as calling me and his mom. Fortunately, Dean’s flight was grounded in Rockford, IL due to fog in Peoria and was taking the opportunity to refuel. They pulled him off the plane and got him to a hospital. His parents were waiting at the Peoria airport about two and a half hours away and drove down to collect him. I biked home having given the name of his medication to the people on the phone and called his dad.

I let a few people know what had happened via text and by the time I made it home I had a lot of people texting me and asking what they could do. Which was nice, but there was nothing, literally nothing anyone could do. My sister-in-law offered to order lunch for me, which at the time, I thought was nice but unnecessary. After calling my mom to update her, talking to Dean’s mom, and then talking to a rather out-of-it Dean, I logged on to get some work done.

There was no point in me loading the cats up and going up there when he was going to be with his family. I would have just been an extra person and blown a lot of gas and distressed a couple of cats. I was fine. I wasn’t the one who had a seizure. I didn’t even have to witness it this time.

It was while I was working that I realized how distracted my brain was and how exhausted I was. I put it down to being a little worried and getting up at 4am to get Dean to the airport. All the same, I decided to take my sister-in-law up on that offer for food. I was too distracted to think about making myself anything.

After getting a few key things done, I logged off of work, but I couldn’t settle. For the rest of the day, I think I FaceTimed almost everyone I knew. I told them that I was fine, that Dean was going to be fine. But I was unable to sit still and unwilling to be ‘alone’ although I had been looking forward to it all week. People had even offered to come and just ‘be’ with me and I had told them thanks, but I was fine. I was fine! Why would I need anyone to come all the way over.

I tried to pause between phone calls a couple of times to write, or just chill, but I couldn’t. I actually wasn’t able to make myself write for the next few days. 

I still thought I was fine.

It wasn’t until I made what I thought was going to be my final call of the night to Dean that i actually lost it. I asked him why he didn’t have any medication in his system and he said he guessed he hadn’t been taking it as regularly as he should. I asked him how he was going to fix that. He said he had an alarm on his phone and maybe he should start paying better attention to it and that he’d do his best. I believe that’s where I started crying and telling him that that wasn’t good enough. 

I don’t remember a lot of what I said. I remember reminding him that he could have been alone, he could have been behind the wheel of a car. I reminded him that my cousin had died a year ago having a seizure in a pool and that I needed him to take his medication. I also remember a lot of inarticulate crying.

I was decidedly not fine. 

The rest of the weekend passed without incident. I was useless on Saturday. I did just about nothing, but I couldn’t nap or productively rest. In a complete reversal from the day before, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t even open the blinds. I sat on the couch in the dark for most of the day. I tried to listen to an audiobook, but I couldn’t get into the story. It was a lost day.

I did have coffee with some lovely friends, all of whom let me talk about Dean, and then talked to me about other, normal things. Dean has an appointment with his neurologist and has either sent me a picture or taken his medicine in front of me every morning since the incident. I had friends and family who were there when I needed them all weekend, in the way that I needed them, which is an amazing feeling. Dean not only had family there for him, but when I posted the incident on Facebook, an array of friends who sent him messages to both entertain and support him.

Dean was surrounded by good Samaritans who collected his things for him, called his family, and got him medical attention. I was literally ‘with’ someone every second of the day that I wanted to be with someone. No one sent my call to voicemail. 

All in all, we are very, very lucky and incredibly thankful.