“SO HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY?...

“How the fuck should I know you just woke me up!” was always the answer in my head as they roused me from sleeping at 7AM every day. As I fought to gain consciousness I would mutter something like “fine” and my day would begin anew… sort of. Let me bring this into perspective here before I go any further. It has all of the makings of a great “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essay if I were still in school. My “Vacation” started Monday morning May 20th and would continue until Friday afternoon May 24th. During this time I would be subjected to a series of tests for epilepsy in an effort to find the cause of the seizures I still have despite the fact I’m taking enough anti-seizure medication to tranquilize an elephant. Seems simple enough right? But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO… They fail to tell you a few things until you can’t escape. Shortly after arriving I was escorted to my eerily quiet room, changed into my PJ’s and then played twenty questions with a couple of doctors and nurses and being instructed to sit in a chair where they super glued thirty little wires to my head after drawing a jigsaw puzzle on my bald head in blue marker (they were thrilled I have a shaved head) then they put a yellow wrist band on me that said “Fall Risk” on it. Then they bound all of the wires together with that tape they use on you after you get a blood test which made me look like a really ugly Hare Krishna guy or one of those big blue character in “Avatar”. I didn’t know if I looked like a science project gone wrong or a piece of performance art, but it was interesting. After that I was buckled and LOCKED into a padded bed for the entire week. When I had to go to the bathroom I had to flag someone down so that they could unlock me long enough to do what I needed to do then re-lock me again. I’m pretty sure that wrist band was some sort of entertainment for the staff… I mean REALLY…where could I go? I’m plugged into a monitor with a bunch of squiggly lines on it and a live video feed of ME on it 24/7. It was like having my own personal podcast. Every time I blinked, burped, coughed or whatever one of those lines would do a different dance. When I moved the camera mounted on the ceiling for follow me to make sure whatever I did was visible. The tests were interesting… not. Sleep deprivation, Cognitive tests (boring), adding and subtracting meds, and (my all time favorite) flashing strobe lights in different speeds and patterns which are supposed to induce an epileptic seizure. All it succeeded in doing was taking me on a trip down memory lane to high school and college. (I kept waiting to hear Jefferson Airplane or Pink Floyd on the speakers every time they did that.) The only thing all of that managed to do was give me a case of the munchies and verify that neurologists use too many of their own sample drugs. Every day it was more of the same, always starting out with “How are you feeling today?” which would be asked again, and again, and again about a dozen times each day. Each day there would be fewer and fewer answers as to what the problem was, but I did get to learn a few things while I was there. The hospital I was staying in was Good Samaritan. For those of you unfamiliar with Phoenix it’s the hospital they used in the movie “Waiting to Exhale”. (I learned that by accident when it was being filmed. I was there to see some friend or relative and got off on the wrong floor and was me by two mountains masquerading as security and put back into the elevator to the right floor.) I had only been a patient there once… the day I was born. The first few days of my life was spent in the pediatric ward there in the old hospital. They tore that hospital down a long time ago and built what is there now. Interestingly enough, I was able to find out through conversations with my dad and hospital staff, we were able to determine that the bed I had been strapped into all week was about eighty feet directly above where I was born (give or take a few feet in any direction). There was something strangely comforting about knowing that. Other than that, all I learned that week was I don’t have epilepsy, I don’t have cancer, I visited where I was born but, now I have a whole bunch of other tests to take… lucky me. Well, I must be going. Next week I get to… you guessed it… start another new “Vacation”.