Side Effects.

Medicating epilepsy is sort of a tricky business—you can’t really tell if a medication is working until it’s not.  There are no signs of improvement other than a lack of seizures, so it’s a total crapshoot.  It’s “working” as long as you don’t have a seizure.  You just kind of pop the pills and hope for the best.

No medication is without side effects; I know that.  When I was first diagnosed, my doctor presented me with a number of treatment options with a heavy recommendation for Keppra, as it is the “drug of choice” for partial epileptics.  But I shied away from it for one reason: it had the potential to alter my personality.

Yeah.

It had the power to change me, not just my epilepsy.  And not in a good way, either—we’re talking hostility, anger, aggression, irritability, mood swings, anxiety, and hallucinations.  (As if I need any more of those things in my life…)

Those words, that risk, terrified me, so I said no.  No, no, NO.

Hell no.

So I picked another drug from the list, a rather innocuous-sounding one called Lamictal, whose worst side effect was a fatal, skin-eating rash (among others, all of which sounded better than being something other than myself).

I played it safe and took Lamictal.

You can’t just start and stop taking epilepsy meds.  That can really mess you up, so you have to ease into them—you start at a super low dose, one that won’t even control epilepsy, and you work your way up to what you need.  (This is yet another complicated piece of the guessing game that is epilepsy management…)

I knew as soon as I started taking Lamictal that I’d made a mistake.

Not only did it make me super tired, but it destroyed my skin (I still bear those damn acne scars), it made my vision weird, and it made me want to kill myself.

There are countless commercials for medications that cause “suicidal thoughts,” which is a phrase that gets thrown around so much that it loses meaning, but let me tell you—they are no joke.  They are the most irrational, bizarre ideas.  They just pop into your head with their casual poison: Hey, what if you committed suicide today, okay?  Okay!  Put it on your to-do list! 

Killing myself: It seemed as rational and mundane as buying milk.

I had the meta-awareness to prevent myself from following through with these crazy plans, so I called my doctor, and we began the slow process of stopping this drug.

When I started the next drug, my doctor once again recommended Keppra, but after my last nightmare drug, I was loath to try it.  After all, it could turn me into a raging super bitch.

So we tried another. Its side effects were annoying (tiredness, dizziness, vision problems, coordination problems, dry mouth/eyes/nose), but I didn’t want to kill myself, so I was willing to put up with the other stuff.  And it seemed to work.

Until it didn’t.

I had that super seizure while I was driving, and then I knew I had to try something else.

My doctor brought up Keppra again (and brain surgery, which also sounded terrifying), and its risk weighed heavy in my mind, but after surviving suicidal thoughts, a year of medical leave, and a seizure-induced car accident, I figured I didn’t have much else left to lose…except my personality.

So, I took the Keppra prescription, and my hands trembled as I took that first dose, that yellowish horse pill almost bouncing out of my palm on its way to my mouth, but I sucked it up and swallowed it down.

You know what happened next?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

None of my fears about taking this medication came to pass.  I didn’t turn into a bitch.  (Well, not any worse than usual.)  I didn’t have any suicidal thoughts.  I didn’t get any more zits than usual.  I didn’t get super tired.  And I didn’t lose myself.

I’m still me.  Maybe even more than I’ve been since my diagnosis.  Time will tell.  I still don’t know how well it’s working to control my seizures (since I can only assume it’s working until it’s not), but I am learning to take one day at a time.  It’s all I can do.

There’s a lesson here: I let all that damn fear about what might happen keep me from enjoying and anticipating the good that willhappen.

Ohhhh, what a powerful metaphor that one was.

Fear and worry are powerful motivators, but only if we allow them to be.  We really don’t have any idea about what’s going to happen, and a lot of the things we worry about don’t even come to pass.  Worry is a waste of the imagination, and it just feeds our fears.  It’s a vicious cycle, and it’s one that we are responsible for instigating.

It’s best to just admit that—it’s a hard pill to swallow (pun completely intended), I know, but it’s impossible to live a full life if worry and fear keep you from doing so.

So face your fears.

Imagine something more beautiful than worry.

And take your meds.  Your doctor really does know best.

On Reflection, Prayers, and Bossy Love.

I was paging through my prayer journal this week, which always proves an interesting perusal.  I do it every once in awhile, and it’s always fascinating and painful and bittersweet and wonderful and just…good.  It’s good to see where I was, to see how my needs have been met, to be reminded that I am being cared for, that my prayers are important, and that they are heard.

But they are reminders, too, of my pain.  Those prayers are some of my most raw and honest writing, words I hope no one will ever see.  They are so personal and so ugly and so desperate, and they are so often born of sheer hopelessness.  They are, I admit, often a last resort, because I hate feeling weak enough to need to pray.

In one of my weaker moments, when the decision to quit teaching seemed less, Yes, this is clearly the path I must take and more,What the hell have I just done?!, when I was frantic about losing my adulthood identity and feeling all sorts of pressure to do what everyone else wanted me to do, I opened up my prayer journal and poured my heart out to God.

I felt like quitting teaching was right.  Even though I loved doing it and I think I was pretty good at it (read: bossy), I felt like it was time to move on.  But move on to…what?  We didn’t have a family that I could focus on like our other 30-something-year-old friends did.  (We cannot have children of our own—I’ve written many an angry prayer to God about that one.)  I couldn’t (and still can’t) drive myself anywhere.  So my prospects seemed rather dim.  And yet…quitting just felt right.  Confusing, but right.

Like going through a door.

So, in my desperation, I just…wrote.  I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote—I wrote four pages that night, all of them full of confused, desperate, jumbled words.  I didn’t even really know what I was praying for, to be honest. It was as if my very soul were praying.  (My mind had nothing to do with it, save the task of controlling my pen.)  The words just fell out of me. I asked for an outlet for my bossy love.   I asked for true connection.  And I asked for love reciprocated.

And I reread those this week, and I was shocked and amazed, because that confused, desperate, jumbled prayer had been answered, because I became a foster mom mere days after I prayed those words.

True connection.  Love reciprocated.  An outlet for my bossy love.

And I got all three.

God is good.

Grace and Turds.

Our foster son has taken a lot of pride recently in keeping our deck nice and clean for us, and our dog…well, our dog really hasn’t.

Our dog Oz has this little “problem,” see—he was hit by a car a couple years ago and the impact broke his tail (which mostly recovered) and damaged his rectal and bladder nerves (which mostly didn’t), so he leaks pee and drops turds everywhere.  He can’t help it.  It has become almost endearing to us now—every time we come home, the sight of us usually inspires such excitement in him that he pees on our feet and poops in our way, but that sort of affection—however disgusting—is pretty precious.  (I mean, he gets so excited to see us that he pees himself.  Who wouldn’t want that kind of reception?)

Other people—our vet included—wondered why we didn’t put him down when he had the accident, but we were madly in love with him and we just couldn’t.  We decided that we’d put up with the mess, that it was a small price to pay for such unconditional love.

It just requires that we sweep the turds off our front steps and our deck all the time.

So you can imagine our foster son’s frustration after he’d spent the entire day sweeping and cleaning the deck when Oz scrambled up there (he’s mastered the art of getting past the locked gate) and did his business all over the place.

“I hate this,” he grumbled.  “You should get a new dog.”

We adopted Oz from another family when he grew too large for their small town house (he’s a 100-pound bear), and they knew he’d have a better life in the country.  So he was completely house-trained when we got him, and then…yeah.  The accident.  He’s a mess now, true, but he’s our mess, and we love him anyway.

Love is pretty complicated.  Yeah, it’s patient and kind and all that other beautiful stuff, but it’s complicated.  It takes work and effort, and sometimes we have to clean up each other’s messes (literally and figuratively), but if we let it, it can flourish in spite of this inconvenience.

This is the miracle of grace.

So I tried to explain this to our foster son.

“He is a mess.  You’re right about that,” I said.  “But it’s not like he’s doing it on purpose.  He can’t help it.  He’s part of this family, and he loves us.  Love is his gift to us, so we love him, too, mess and all.”

And then he got really quiet.  His brow furrowed and he stared at the ground and he nodded.  “Kind of like a foster kid, huh?”

And then I almost turned into a mess myself.  It was hard to hold in the tears.  But I managed to smile at him and say, “Yes.  Exactly like a foster kid.”

Keys.

It was a strange feeling—turning in my school keys.

Since I’d started working at the school seven years ago, I’d never turned them in to the office for the summer as many teachers did.  They’d always been with me, heavy with significance.  They defined me, just like my argyle cardigans and boring slacks and sensible shoes (except on Fridays).  Those keys made me a teacher.  They were official.  I kept them on a lanyard with my staff badge, after all.  How much more official can you get than that?

So it was weird, handing them over to the secretaries on that last day, knowing that gesture represented so much more than not being able to unlock room 202 anymore.

I was giving up teaching, and it became real in that moment.

My keys would be given to another teacher, my classroom, too.  When I return to that place, it will be as a mere visitor.  I won’t have my keys to gain access to the building.  I’ll have to use the visitor’s entrance and get one of those ridiculous visitor stickers, even though everyone already knows who I am.  My classroom won’t be my classroom anymore.  My students won’t be--

No.

They will forever be my students.

So my keys—turning them in, I mean—represented all of this.  For seven years, they had granted me access to the magical little world that was my classroom, this place of imagination and hard work and love and energy and fun, and I was passing them off like an Olympic torch.

My leg of this race is run.

These aren’t the only keys I’ve given up this year.  I gave up my car keys in January, and though it was hard, it did not devastate me.  Giving up these keys was hard, but I can’t let it devastate me.

In time, new keys will come into my life, and they’ll unlock new and glorious mysteries that I cannot yet even begin to fathom.

Wings.

I didn’t think it would end like this.

I thought I’d go out in a blaze of glory, on my own terms, when I was ready.

I didn’t think my health would force me out of teaching.

In a way, though, bittersweet as it is, I am ready.  I’m ready to move on. I am ready for this new chapter of my life. I don’t know what it will bring, but I truly feel like my time as a teacher has ended.  I can only hope that any good I have done at that school will continue to echo and ripple and flow.

Now I must find new good to do.  It is out there, in the unknown, in the wild, scary beyond. I’m not sure yet where it will come (or where to even look for it, to be honest), but I must believe that it will come.  I must hold on to that hope, even if it scares me.

This—leaving the comfort of the familiar—is as terrifying to me as jumping off a cliff.

I’ve been standing at the edge of this cliff for a while now—probably since my epilepsy diagnosis back in 2012, truth be told—and it has taken all of my faith and courage to even consider this leap.

I am terrified, but I know I must do this.

Something beautiful awaits me beyond this cliff, and I’ll never discover what it is if I just stand at its edge.

Ray Bradbury (may he rest in peace) said it best: “Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off.  Build your wings on the way down.”

What faith that takes, what courage—to leap without wings!

Faith and courage are kind of the same thing, aren’t they?  They both require risk. They require action in spite of fear, in spite of reluctance, in spite of doubt.  They require daring.  They require discomfort.

They require a willingness to walk (er, leap?) blindly into the unknown and trust that a way will present itself where there doesn’t appear to be one.

I must find my faith, my courage, and I must make this leap.  I am terrified of falling, but I know in my heart of hearts that I must do this.

I must leap in faith, in courage, and I must build my wings.

(How else am I supposed to fly?)





The Power of Words.

As soon as I decided I was leaving my job, I started the arduous task of writing letters to each of my fifty-or-so students.  I’m not talking about the same letter printed fifty times with only the names changed—no, not that.  Not saccharine sentiments about “best wishes for the future” or similar generic fluff.  Not that, either.  I didn’t find some Pinterest-perfect template.  I didn’t look to Hallmark for the words.

I’m talking about fifty one-of-a-kind, individually-crafted letters, the kind of letters where I ripped open my heart and bled onto the page for each of them.

It took months to find the time, to find the words.  But I found them.  It wasn’t all that hard—I knew those kids so well, and I had so much to say to them.  So many good things.  So many blessings, so many moments and memories to be thankful for.  So many things I’d noticed, so many things I wanted them to know—truths I hoped they’d cling to forever.

Those words were my gift to those kids.

I gave them those letters today, and their response was at once subtle and overwhelming.  Some were completely silent.  Some laughed, some cried, some shook their heads.  Some wrote their own letters to me in response.  I got a lot of hugs, a chorus of I’ll miss you’s, and their thanks.

But one boy folded his letter into a tiny square and stuck it into the fold of his wallet, and that was the best response I could have hoped for.

Mystery Injuries.

I’m not entirely sure, but I think I may have broken a toe.

I had another seizure last Friday night. My right arm is covered in scrapes and bruises, and my left foot hurts something awful.  I’m not sure why I hurt, but I hurt.

I do all sorts of dumb shit after my seizures, in the moments following the convulsions but before I’m totally conscious.  Mom was there when it happened (thank goodness), and she said that I was lurching/stomping all over the place, trying to rip my pants off (???) and that I was climbing up the banister of our staircase.  (I didn’t try to use the steps, mind you—I was trying to climb up the outside of the banister rails.)  I don’t remember any of this, but Mom did a pretty good reenactment for me when I came to.

So, mystery pain—I’m guessing I either thwacked my foot when I fell to the floor during the seizure, or else I did something to it when I was trying to climb up the banister.  I don’t know.

It sounds stupid—to be unsure of something like that.  But I’m coming to discover that mysterious injuries are just part of this whole epilepsy thing.

I hate that these wounds are always self-inflicted.