You know when you’re about to seize, even if it’s never happened before. You feel a storm of electricity about to strike your every brain cell. You feel it in the lightness of your head. Your fingertips feel like they’ve shrunk down to the size of butterfly needles in a Shrinky Dink oven. You let yourself fall back into the blackness. Your breathing is cut short. You don’t really know where you’ve been the past hour, and you’re confused because you can’t remember what it felt like to not feel like you do now. Then out of the darkness, you feel your body shoot up like something from the “Exorcist,” and your head curls over and bobs above your outstretched legs; gooey, clear fluid oozes from your mouth into your hand, swirled with what looks like red food coloring. You feel your saturated brain swell and compress against your skull, a water balloon in the firm fist of a too-eager third-grader who is filling the latex bag to the point of explosion. This was my reality: my life was out of my hands.
A woman shook me, her stinging fear welled in her blue eyes that looked like wet marbles. Behind her, a man moved his mouth, a man I knew I should recognize but couldn’t, whose speech was muted behind the throbbing of my skull. The world went black again, and when I next woke up, everything was loud. I was surrounded by what felt like a million frantic people. One was crouched next to me, holding my head, saying, “Stay awake. Charlotte, you need to stay awake. Don’t close your eyes.” But my eyes kept closing and people kept shaking me awake. The man I didn’t recognize was asking me where I was, what my name was, who the president was—none of which I could answer. I was in a pressure chamber of questions, sounds, air, and sloshing water all fighting for the same 11-pound space that was my head.
Over the next few hours, saline was slowly injected into my bloodstream, and I drifted in and out of consciousness, not knowing who or where I was. I remember my head feeling like someone had pumped 10 gallons of gasoline into it, and I remember being in an ambulance that shook and rattled and turned so sharply that I felt the walls of my skull expand from the pressure.
I felt like I was floating on a cloud above my body. I watched as people in white (God knows who) lifted my body onto a white bed that they wheeled into a white room. There they dressed me in a white smock and tucked my body under warm cotton like a doll. I peered down and saw my face. It looked inanimate, soulless, unaware. I remember yelling at my body, wanting nothing more than to shrink back into it, the missing glass slipper into which my consciousness perfectly fit. I regretted hating it for so many years. I opened my mouth but no sound emerged; it felt like one of those dreams in which you try to run, but the ground is suddenly a treadmill that makes you run in place and trip over your feet.
I became conscious in an emergency room for a short time. I remember waking up and feeling both my arms plugged with a saline bag. I have a fragmented memory of a nurse taking me into a bathroom where I saw my body in the mirror’s reflection. There were dried streaks of blood in my hair and millions of flaky, brown platelets forming dry rivulets down my chin onto my neck. I scratched the flakes off with my numbed fingers, and when I opened my mouth, I gaped in horror at my destroyed tongue, patchy with blood blisters and swollen like half-chewed raw meat. The muscle looked like someone had taken a knife to its side and ripped it open like an English muffin. My tongue hung out, and I heard my slurred and muffled voice say, “What the fuck happened to my tongue? Did I give Pinhead a blowjob?”
The world kept cutting out. I remember hearing mentions of a helicopter and the words, “she needs to go now, or …” before fluorescent, violent phosphenes danced in front of me in the darkness of my consciousness. They were lightning strikes in the black ink sea that I was drowning in. I fell back-first, arms-out into the darkness, and it enveloped me.
I next woke up in the intensive care unit, days later maybe, in some place called “Utah,” which I knew didn’t sound like home. There were two people in scrubs drawing blood from my fingertips into tubes that looked like the ink vials in plastic Bic pens. Another person in scrubs was trying to place an IV in my right arm, shooting through the vein six times because it was the consistency of overcooked spaghetti, disintegrating into a bruise with each poke.
For the next few days in the ICU, every hour on the dot, someone came in to draw more blood from my fingertips. By the time I left the ICU, my fingertips looked like they’d been forcefully run over a cheese grater and then stuffed into a garbage disposal. Doctors checked in on me three to four times an hour—one happened to be a Colorado College alumna. She asked me where I lived on campus while she pressed her oddly warm stethoscope to my chest. I heard my voice mumble “Mathias.” (I’d only lived in Mathias for a few days my first year.) I passed out before I could hear her response.
The ultimate diagnosis was that I had had a non-epileptic tonic-clonic seizure, commonly known as grand mal seizure. But really, I had maybe three or four grand mal seizures in a row, caused by low sodium. I had been extremely over-hydrated after drinking too much water, so my blood sodium level was extremely low—ironically, in Salt Lake City. The morning of July 8, I had felt funny and lightheaded while lying down to get my eyebrows waxed. I remember closing my eyes while the esthetician pulled wax across my skin. I felt like my body was sinking into the table. My head hurt and I felt dizzy, high even, which I figured was because I had skipped breakfast. When I went to pay, I remember not being able to type the PIN for my debit card, looking at the numbers on the keypad and not recognizing the figures—they just looked like meaningless white squiggles on the black plastic. With each step I took back to my car, it felt like my head weighed a thousand tons and I was sinking into the asphalt of the parking lot as if it were quicksand, and the air felt heavy, thick, and suffocating on my entire body. But I knew I needed to get to my sister’s house, so I got into my car anyway.
Looking back now, I realize I was seizing when I came to the first stoplight in my car: my head cocked to one side and my jaw cranked open, convulsing like I was going to vomit. When you seize, you have no idea that the things your body is doing shouldn’t be happening, which is why I only now realize that the convulsions weren’t normal and that I was having some sort of seizure. In the moment of one, your entire reality is being seized upon by electric shock. I’m lucky (and so is everyone else who was driving that day) that this happened at a red light. After my jaw convulsed like it did, I just remember feeling so sick and wanting nothing more than to lie down. I saw the light turn green, and I told myself that I just had to make it a mile more to my sister’s house, where I could lie down. I don’t remember actually driving there, but my mom said that when I arrived, I was acting “like I was on drugs.” She said I broke a bowl and poured pure table salt into another, which I “ravenously” ate with a spoon. I imagine I looked like some sort of rabid hyena, but instinctively acquiring and eating this salt as if it were a bowl of cereal is the only reason I’m still alive and writing this article today.
However, the seizure wasn’t a one-time thing in the sense that if I just physically increased my sodium level, I would be done with it. It was a reset—my body feels and looks different now than it used to. My brain processes information differently. I’m still searching for the words to describe the transformation I went through and what happened.
When I first woke up in the ICU, I didn’t know who I was. My autobiographical memory felt like it had been cracked like the porcelain bowl I broke when I was frantically searching for the salt that saved my life. I read through the social media accounts my laptop was signed into and the journals that I had apparently kept since I was eight. This was how I discovered who I had been for over 20 years—through retweeted memes, superficial captions on photos, and tags from people with whom I was supposedly friends. Going through my old journals felt like I was reading the most intimate experiences and innermost secrets of a stranger. These accounts were written in a handwriting that matched my own, and the girl who wrote the words had my same sense of humor, but the words weren’t mine. The person I read about was physically me, but the me before the seizure and the me I am today are different people with separate experiences and distinct memories.
I felt out-of-body disassociated for about three weeks after I first gained consciousness. I remember being so happy, happier than I’d been since I was an infant, because when you don’t have any memories, your life is a clean slate—a mind free of trauma and heartbreak and fear and abandonment. I used to question the effectiveness of electroconvulsive therapy for mental illness, but I now see how it could work for some. If you shock your brain numb, you can’t even remember that you had any baggage to begin with.
I opened my eyes one morning and a rush of trauma and heartbreak and fear and abandonment surged through my entire nervous system. My body felt heavy and my consciousness caved into a fleshy mass of discomfort and ache. The body I woke up in wasn’t mine; every cell of it felt different than I remembered. It looked different too, and I still look in the mirror and wrestle with the reflection I see. The mirror doesn’t show the image of the self I saw for the first 20 years of my life. I gained 65 pounds in the two months after the seizure, which is a lot of thiccness to add to a body that had previously been very thin. I feel this weight on my body every second of every day, reminding me with every movement how much both myself and my body have changed.
People tell me I’m “a new person,” and I have changed since the seizure. I used to introduce myself as Charlotte because I was Charlotte then, but I feel like I’m an imposter if I call myself that name or respond to it now.
When I think back on my life before the seizure, I have memories I know I should identify with now, but I can’t find the personal attachment to them I know I should feel. Any pre-seizure memories just feel inserted; I feel disconnected from almost everything back then.
Just thinking about the old me is like remembering a boyfriend or girlfriend who I’m still in love with, but who broke up with me and has since blocked me from their life. It aches to think about the old Charlotte, because my life revolved around that person for over 20 years. She’s the person who gets me unlike anyone else, and she knows all of my quirks and peeves and desires. But when I try to reach out and find her, the rejection feels like I’m lunging into a static void that makes my entire body ring with a tingling pain. Thinking about her is like hitting my funny bone on a sharp corner.
But despite how uncomfortable adjusting to my new mind and body has been since the seizure, the reset has given me somewhat of a clean slate to work with. Every day is like Christmas—I re-befriend people who I may have some fuzzy, hidden, distant memory of, but whom I haven’t felt personally close to for the past year. I hear all these stories about my old self that I may not recall, too, and when others share their memories of me, I can almost feel my synapses pulling and stretching out to reach the memory in a place in my own head that was otherwise inaccessible. I’ve since found out that I said “Uh-huh, honey” referencing “Bound 2” by Kanye West in a speech in front of 20,000 people, and that I’ve written many “sweet letters” to friends and strangers alike. I’ve also learned that I used to dislike dogs, which is wild for me to consider now, granted dogs make the world go ’round. I also apparently like different music than I used to. (According to some, my music taste has become worse. Oops.) But many people have also told me that I seem happier, “more approachable and outgoing,” which is quite a lovely thing to hear because I know the old me used to be perpetually stressed.
My short-term memory is also pretty fried, but this has become a part of me. My bad memory is something I poke fun at, an inside joke with my friends. What I do and don’t remember is sporadic; I can’t remember what it’s like to be in love or what having sex for the first time meant to me. I don’t have the memory of learning to ride a bike, although I can still ride one. But I do remember every lyric to each song on Ke$ha’s first album. So, if anything, this experience has taught me my brain’s priorities.
People tell me I’m not the same me that I was before, and they’re right, which is why I now only introduce myself as Lo. I feel different too. I’m no longer on a cloud above my body like I was for weeks post-seizure, but I still never feel entirely present in this body. “Charlotte” feels like a stranger, some distant daydream I had years ago, a person I don’t know how to be anymore. When I woke up in the ICU, I was a fragmented version of “Charlotte,” somewhere in the middle and only a fraction of the person the name signified (CharLOtte). Lo and behold, I realized I was Lo.
This past spring, while I was taking a semester off, I filled out an application to transfer to another college because I couldn’t remember whether I had friends at CC. I knew I had dramatically changed both mentally and physically, and I was unsure whether the people who did keep in contact with me while I was gone (who I am so thankful for and who kept me sane those 12 months) would like the new me as much as they liked the old me—a me I saw as a better version of myself and missed dearly.
However, upon deciding to come back to campus at the beginning of the summer, both CC friends I knew before and strangers alike welcomed me with the most open of arms. I didn’t expect such warmth from a community I had previously felt so anxious to return to. And the process of figuring out who my friends are is ever-changing and ongoing, but I think that’s a similar experience for anyone in their twenties. Regardless, the generosity of the people I have found since returning to CC has been the most beautiful affirmation that different doesn’t always mean worse, and that change is okay.
Sometimes when I close my eyes, the phosphenes that danced with me during the darkness of the seizure are still there, but when I open my eyes, I have friends who dance with me in the light too.