The Trauma Chronicles -part one

I was 23 when I had my first seizure.

It happened in the middle of a road, on a dark, rainy afternoon as I was walking home from work. Somebody saw me collapse and start fitting; they carried me to the side of the road and called an ambulance, which blue lighted me to hospital.

I know this because the ambulance crew kindly wrote to me afterwards when I expressed confusion and fear about the blank space in my memory of it all.

I was in hospital for around a week afterwards, and some of those days were spent in a medically induced coma because the doctors couldn't stop the seizure(s) in any other way; the rest were spent having tests.

Nobody could make sense of why it happened, not neurologically, physically, psychologically, chemically; not in any of the well-worn causal avenues of explanation.

I had a sense in me of knowing why, and I didn't have words for it at that time. I hadn't recognised or understood the way trauma shows up back then. For me or for anyone.

Thirteen years later, as a social worker and a fortnight before the wedding I didn't want to go through with, I had another, very similar seizure while walking my dog on a (literal) precipice.

Both of these events ran the exact same way, starting with a complex partial seizure (where I was feeling really odd, my head was swimming, I could still walk and do some things and where my consciousness left me slowly ending in me being in very much a 'lights are on and nobody is home' state) and then progressing suddenly to status epilepticus (where I lost consciousness entirely and entered a state of permanent seizure from which I was deemed unlikely to come round without medical intervention). I was able to text my then partner during the complex partial part, and she came to me, called an ambulance, and I was taken again to hospital.

I was so very frightened after both of these events. I can barely express to you the terror I felt when I woke up in hospital, alone or surrounded by family with absolutely no idea about how I got there.

The dark, totality of blank in my memory was such a shock. I'd been drunk many times by then and this was so totally different to the hazy half-remembered patches I was familiar with from those times.

And the worry, anger, weirdness and sense of being totally out of place I saw in my family the first time I woke up in hospital was utterly disorienting.

It was sometime after the second seizure that I started to connect and suspect that my previously unrecognised and therefore unresolved trauma may have been in the mix of the possible causes.

Certainly stress was in the mix, but usually, stress doesn't cause people to be hospitalised with life threatening seizures. There was something more in me. I had a sense of this and no proof, but I did have the proof of loads and loads of test results to show there was no physical cause.

It was at this point of my life that I started to learn about trauma, to read, move toward conversation and research.

To be continued in part 2...