Category: epilepsy

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Surprising Reassessment of an Old Sketchbook Entry

The very sketchy sketch session

Everything in my field of vision at this urban sketching session back in December 2019 at Luxor Books on Wenceslas Square was surprisingly and, at first, wonderfully kinetic — from the spinning records, to the flurry of holiday shoppers, to the constantly shifting interior lighting affecting and affected by these things. After making a few stabs at trying to navigate a visual foundation with safely erasable graphite, I found that I had spent most of this sketching session noodling around, probing, and just lost and frustrated. If memory serves, I was quite symptomatic that day and that certainly didn’t help matters as it amplified all the visual and cognitive cacophony around and within.

Ultimately I wound up near the end of this sketching session with just a few minutes left to go and nothing to work with but a page of confused thumbnail sketches. The most stable visual available to me was Jan — thanks Jan — who was stolidly perched across from me sketching away so I visually seized on him as my anchor and now — in retrospect — I’m so glad I did 😳

Jan Sketching At Luxor – fountain pen and marker on Khadi paper

Some sketchy clarity on that day found

In retrospect I also now realize that this was all during that time that I was apparently seizing all over the place without being at all aware of it. As I had become mostly homebound by this point nobody knew about it — not even me. I finally seized in public a few weeks later and was hospitalized for a week or so for tests and observation. Turns out MS had been nibbling at my brain stem and turned me into an epileptic. At least I finally understood why sometimes I would find my tongue all chewed up with no explanation.
Silver lining, right?

I’ll take what I can get …

At least things don’t vibrate so much anymore and my tongue is fine 🙂

Plus, this particular sketch holds a lot of unexpected personal reportage for me.

* Q: “Hold up 🖖! Now it’s epilepsy, too?”
A: Umm … 🫤

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Battered Down Memories Of Battened Down Memories

Battered down memories of battened down memories

I’ve missed sketching outside for most of 2020. Even before COVID hit, MS pretty much had me locked down for most of that rocky year. Watching the waves of not only coronavirus, but of how the oscillating stalwart then fickle public response to it has been a tremendously emotional kaleidoscopic plateau to navigate — especially watching how the collective memory here of the valiant stance against the pandemic back in March all but evaporated by June and now we are paying 

What will be remembered?
And how?
And with what?

Two “fresh” reminders have really brought this into perspective for me.

(1) My brain is now measurably atrophying.
Apparently, I was informed of this while hospitalized back in February for several weeks after a series of violent seizures. I hadn’t recalled that at all until just now — late November — when I apparently saw the hospital report from back then.

I like my brain. It has all of my memories and thoughts and the still unfinished rickets and scaffolding of imagination that I’ve been trying to construct to prepare sounding out the whatever it is that is.
 
I guess having somehow wound up forgetting having had learned such unforgettably shattering news from only a few months ago is a bluntly weird way of my brain asserting that it has, indeed been atrophying 🫤.

(2) If that weren’t charming enough, I mentioned to my psychiatrist that I had been forgetting all sorts of things from the trivial to the pressingly important. These lapses were in no way normal — at least for me. Examples include suggesting to my wife that we see a certain film, only to learn that we had seen that very film in a movie theatre just a few weeks ago. Even looking at trailers and scenes from it did nothing to jog my recollection. Fortunately — kinda — I apparently really enjoyed it, according to my wife. My psychiatrist asked me to get an MRI because he wanted to check something. When I came back to visit he was all gleaming and gleeful. “It’s exactly what I thought. Your brain is atrophying! That would explain your memory problems!” He was so thrilled at having guessed it correctly. Clearly he hasn’t won any awards for bedside manner.

Or, maybe that is actually the most professional and courteous tone he could’ve adopted. My guess is that nobody is going to react to learning that their brain is atrophying well. Maybe I should thank my psychiatrist for making light of it 🤔.

Shucks, I dunno 🤷‍♂️

Just gotta keep on making art and otherwise trying to grapple with the whatever it is that is, preferably with an augmented sense of urgency.