It's not that we didn't know about coping with bad things because we did. LInda had been born with epilepsy. Seven years ago a good day was 10-15 grand mal seizures and there wasn't always a lot of good days. Medicine after medicine seemed to have little effect. Sometimes it was not clear what was worse: the seizures or the side effects of the medications. Hope always rested in the next new thing. Life for Linda was like living in a cloud. Clouds though are supposed to go away.
Finally she got hurt really bad. She fell down a flight of stairs during a seizure, hit her face on the banister and literally broke her face. She looked like I had taken a baseball bat and beaten her half to death.
The neurologist finally figured out what we already knew. No medication was going to help. Brain surgery he told us was the only option short of becoming a vegetable or dying. Linda had her amygdala and hippocampus removed and the seizures went away-- for a short time.
When they came back they came back with a vengeance. Four years later she was in Vanderbilt Hospital with seizures worse than ever. The seizures, thank God, now seem under control. They are still there but no longer does Linda measure her day by the seizure count.
The surgery took Linda to a place she had never been before. Disabilities that had never existed prior to the surgery now defined her daily life. Her short term memory was shot and she began to have problems struggling to learn anything. She couldn't concentrate. She was easily distracted and easily overwhelmed by the stimuli around her. She had loved to read all her life, but found at times now she had no comprehension. She could get lost going from one room to the other. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. She was told she had a new label-- traumatic brain injury.
But there was something else wrong and we knew it. Linda was a good and kind person, but at times she was seemingly drowned in moods that overtook her and hijacked her to a place that sometimes we wondered if she was coming back from. We explained it in terms of seizures, of surgery, and when all else failed medication side effects. We had so many explanations that we never bothered to look right in front of us. There were a lot of red flags but we were color blind. My kids and I learned not just to walk on glass, but that there was glass everywhere.
Linda had gotten a vagus nerve stimulator implanted in her chest to control seizures. It had never really worked and was giving her lots of problems. She talked to doctors about getting it out, but never felt like they listened to her. It was a point of growing stress.
On the night of July 10 I got several hysterical phone calls from her. She told me that she was fed up with them lying to her and if they wouldn't take it out she would. I didn't take her serious. After all, who cuts open their own chest?
She was asleep when I got home from work and it was the next morning before I found out what she had done. She had cut a large gash in her chest and then taken a hammer and beaten herself in the chest trying to break the stimulator. Her chest was black and blue and badly swollen. She started up again and I told her if she didn't stop I would call the police. She took off out the door.
I helped the police search for over 2 hours. I thought she was dead. Finally we searched the house one more time. We found her hiding in a closet. She scared the police officer so badly he almost took out his gun and shot her.
She went into a psychiatric hospital. We begin to get answers. It all seems so obvious now. Linda believes the bipolar disorder had been there a long time, just hidden by a thousand other battles.
There is something about being able to call things by their name that gives you freedom. What you can name you can see. What you can see you can live with. What you can live with you can triumph over. We have begun to find answers to questions long unanswered. Hope we know now need not be wishful thinking. It is real and yes hope does work. Our most profound wish is that you and your family may find out the same thing.