Today is Thursday, September 19, 2013 and I have been seizure free for one month.
Relative to the 28 years that I've been alive, a month is nothing. Relative to the most unusual moment within those 28 years, a month is a lifetime.
My co-workers and I had just finished our takeout burritos. It was that time of day when you start comparing all of the ways you could spend an afternoon to the way you're about to.
Fearing the post-lunch food coma, I sauntered back to my desk began clearing unread emails. After opening a three word email, I realized that I wasn't making sense of the words. To shake out the cobwebs I got up and took a quick walk across the office. Arriving back at my desk, feeling the victor, I picked up on emails again.
That's when it happened: my brain checked out and everything went dark.
I came to surrounded by co-workers and paramedics. I touched my head to find a great big knot approximately where my head would have met the corner of the desk and/or the hard wood floor.
Feeling exhausted (an expected result from a couple of minutes of involuntary contractions of every muscle in your body, I would learn), the paramedics asked a few questions; some answers I knew, some I just couldn't come up with. They loaded me up gurney style and we all took a trip down to the local emergency room.
Let me be clear, I'm sharing this story not to drum up sympathy or because I need anything. But I want to tell it to share with you an experience that's changed my life forever.
When things are going well in life, it is easy to take it all for granted. It's easy to get a little arrogant about how good your handle on life has become. And that's certainly how I felt most days in the last several months prior to my seizure: in control.
Then one Thursday I lost all control of my thoughts and actions. As a result, I needed a nurse to help me take off my pants (no fantasies came true, just a seizure induced pee pants episode). I laid in the ER alone for several hours until my family arrived left to my own thoughts and fears on what the future might hold. I was informed that I couldn't legally drive for six months. It's rough news to hear, especially when you're still too tired to honestly care about anything but trying find a comfortable position on a hospital bed (nearly impossible).
Over the last 28 days (tonic-clonic incident free, mind you.) I have gained a clarity about what we are to do here on Earth. I gained a lot of perspective on what is important and what really, really isn't. And most of all I've learned what it feels like to be loved, and let myself be loved, by the people around me.
It's amazing to be surrounded by friends and family, who find out the news and send an email or text. We weren't even really telling anyone what happened, because answers were few and tests were ongoing. It didn't make much sense to make a Facebook announcement that "we're not sure what happened, why it occurred, or if we'll ever know anything." To announce the facts would have been a status update of, "Kris peed his pants at work today, an MRI reveals he indeed has a brain, more to come..."
Just knowing that there are people who care is amazing, but to also hear offers to help and to know people are praying for you is to know that you are loved. But I quickly began to feel and learn something more, that I play a role in letting people serve and love. Offers to help were pouring in and I was choosing, on occasion, to instead struggle alone. I was rejecting their chance to serve and love - very convicting.
The light bulb is starting to come back on after the whole electrical storm in my brain. I'm realizing that by accepting help, learning to ask for help, talking through my emotions with others, and offering specific ways to pray for me, my load is lightened and I'm able to share it with those around me who have capacity to offer to help me carry on. For we are not created to bear our burdens alone and we were not created to bear only our own burdens.
Thank you a million times over. Your service is humbling and your love is encouraging. It would be so difficult to be here without you.
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