Epilepsy - S1E5

You're listening to The Paul Young Podcast. Over the course of podcasts, We're going to talk about a lot of things and you'll get to know me quite well. You won't get to know everything about me because I don't even know everything about me. This is true for every human being. You'll never know the whole story, and you'll never know how it ends. Now, we who are addicted to certainty, we really think that we know the whole story, and we really think we know how it's going to end.

But we don't. And so one of the things in terms of how we relate to people, love doesn't presume to know everything and doesn't presume to know how it's all going to end. The how it's all going to end part is just what I like to call future tripping, creating imaginations that don't actually really exist. But we extrapolate what we think we know about somebody and we think we know how it's going to end. And a lot of times because our future tripping imaginations are wedded to fear.

What we think we are going to see down the road is something traumatic and terrible. And so then we embed that kind of trauma-centered, fear-based imagination into our relationships in the moment. And it becomes something that really messes us up as well as spills over into our relationships around us. So I've got friends on death row. And I'll tell you about them over the course of time.

But when you look at any one man on death row, I guarantee you, you don't know the whole story. And I guarantee you, you also don't know how this is going to end. Now. In our lives, we're going to face different kinds of challenges, different kinds of surprises. It's inevitable. We live in a world full of human beings, and it's a broken world.

You know, some of those challenges are far more difficult than others. And when you look at what somebody else is facing, you just can't imagine how you would deal with what they're dealing with. Well, again. You can't imagine it. You don't get grace for things that don't exist in your life. Grace is given to the person who is actually in the situation. So about...

I don't know, I think it's almost four years now, a really strange thing happened to me. I was walking down the hall of our house and suddenly it was like I stepped into an electrical current or a live wire. This electrical charge started with my feet and you could almost watch it come up my body and over my head. And with it came an incredibly intense wave of nausea. And this...

wave of nausea and this electrical current lasted about, oh, a minute before it subsides. There was a rush of heat and a fast pulse and a cold sweat. And I was left going like, what was that? And then about 15 minutes later, it happened again. And 15 minutes later, it happened again over a period of time. And then it changed to 30 minutes. It was just like clockwork.

And that went for the first time. Over a course of four days, it became an hour, hour and a half, two hours, and then it dissipated. It left me exhausted. Even after the first of those, it was exhausting. And I ended up sleeping a lot between those episodes. Also, some other things happened. the barrier between my rational thought and my emotions began to break down. Which wasn't all bad, let me tell you. I suddenly began to feel things that normally I would just block.

And not because I tried to block it, it's just that I have a history of difficulties and trauma in which my survival mechanism included blocking the emotional side of my world. But one of the things that was very cool is that I had no fear. I had a sense of being loved and wrapped in kindness, but no fear. It's kind of a good side effect. Anyway...

The first time lasted for four days, and it took me about, I don't know, a day and a half to recover, which isn't bad. And I was thinking, what did I do? Did I run into some chemical or... What in the world was this? But it was gone. So I downplayed it and didn't go to the doctor or anything because it was gone. That was in March, a number of months later, right before Thanksgiving.

It happened again. This time, it only lasted for about three days. And it took me about two and a half, almost three days to recover. That is, to get back my sense of normalcy. Although the sense of emotional presence, the sense of being able to cross the divide between my intellect and my emotions and that wall coming down.

That stayed. It stayed between the episodes. Then it was gone. Well, about this time I'm thinking, I should probably talk to somebody about this because this can't be normal. I've never experienced anything like this in my life.

So I was referred by a doctor to a neuroscientist. And I met him, and we went through a bunch of tests. And he said, you know, I think you should go see this neurologist up at the hospital. And he'll run you through a bunch of scans and things like that. So I did. And I went through them all and then waited for the results.

When they came back, the doctor didn't tell me what their, oh, he did tell me that I didn't have a brain tumor and I didn't have, you know, bleeding inside the walls of my skull. There was nothing like that. Nothing in terms of what they were looking for that was major and could be life-threatening. But he referred me again to another neurologist up near our place, which was fine.

right before Christmas had another episode. This one only lasted for, I don't know, a day and a half, but it took four days to recover from. And before I got to see the doctor up near our area, I had another one. right at the beginning of February. And this time, it only lasted for about, not much more over a day, but it took me a week to recover. This is during COVID. And the doctor and I got on a Zoom call.

And he started asking me a bunch of questions. And he says, have you ever had a head injury? And I'm thinking like, yes, a pretty significant one in my early 20s. And he said, what happened? I said, well, I was a pedestrian, and I got hit by a 17-year-old high-risk driver doing, I don't know, 50, 55 miles an hour in the center turning lane of a four-lane road to each direction.

The young man knocked me two houses down the street, and I ended up in a heap in front of the pastor's house. He was walking out the door of his house to get in a car, to go to the airport, to go preach somewhere. Part of the miraculous about this was that he is an XEMT and within 30 seconds an off-duty ambulance happened to be coming one direction and a couple cops the other direction and they all descended on me and...

got me ready to take me to the hospital, emergency, because I was really a wreck. They did surgeries on me. They told me later it was without anesthetic because they were so... afraid because of the head injuries that I would lapse into a permanent coma. And so they did these surgeries. When I came to conscious awareness a few days later, I had total amnesia.

Like, not quite 100%. But I didn't know who I was. I didn't know what country I was in. I didn't know what year it was. I didn't know one person who walked in the door. So... Kim, who was my friend at the time, when she walks in, bursts into tears because I'm quite a wreck. And she just turns around and leaves. And I'm thinking like, boy, she's cute. I wonder who she is.

The only relationship that I actually knew that made it through the wreck was that I had a relationship with Jesus. That's the only one. So I was at... perfect peace. In fact, as I think about it, it was probably the most peaceful time in my life up to that point. I had no memory of hurting anybody, of lying to anybody, of having any addictions, nothing. I was like, I'm a new person. Well, it didn't last. My memories start coming back, and so did the addictions, and so did the regrets.

But one of the sidelights of this whole thing was because of that accident, I eventually married Kim. Supposedly, I had this really significant relationship at the time with a particular young woman. but it knocked it completely out of my life. I have one little memory of talking to her in a car, and that's it. So it was like, no, sorry. And eventually...

I married Kim. So I told the doctor about this accident. And he says, huh, you know, I'm like 98% certain that you have left frontal lobe focal point epilepsy. Well, he happens to be a neurologist who's an epileptologist. It's his specialization. And I think that's why everybody referred me to him finally. And I'm like, epilepsy? He goes, yes, epilepsy. I've got no epilepsy in my family. He said, that's why I asked you about the accident, because...

That kind of shock to your brain can tear the myelin off of your neurocircuits. And he said, look at it this way. This is the best thing because this is how you tell a storyteller some medical diagnosis. He says, Think of it this way. Your brain is a forest through which run major highways, and off in the corner of the woods somewhere are these two crazy guys lighting fires.

And so they light a little fire and after a little while it goes out. So they light it again and it goes out. And when you get to about two to four centimeters of burn, you start having symptoms. And it had taken that long, that many years for me to start having symptoms. And he said, the thing that we have to do is to prevent that fire from reaching one of the highways because then everything would burn, which would be a grand mal seizure.

and i was moving toward them the space in between the episodes was shortening the impact was longer And so that's where I was headed. So he put me immediately on a particular anti-seizure medication. And it took me the next couple of years to finally get to the place where... I only get now a seizure or two every three to four weeks, and it's much easier to handle. It doesn't knock me out as much, but it took me out for a couple of years. Now, a week after I was diagnosed,

I was looking for this Dostoevsky quote, and I knew it was somewhere in one of his books, but I couldn't find it. While I was looking for it, I ran across a note, and it's... And it says this, that for much of Dostoevsky's adult life, he suffered from an unusual and at times extremely debilitating form of temporal lobe epilepsy. I didn't know that. In 1867, the same year he began work on The Idiot, he wrote to his doctor,

This epilepsy will end up by carrying me off because they didn't have any anti-seizure meds. My memory has grown completely dim. I don't recognize people anymore. I'm afraid I'm going mad or falling into idiocy. Dostoevsky's attacks were preceded by a brief period of intense, joyous, mystical experience, which he described as being worth years of his life or perhaps even his whole life. Now.

He is describing exactly what I experienced when I was having one of the episodes. It was remarkable. It wasn't euphoric, but it was really intense, and there was a beauty to it in the midst of all the challenge of it. And it goes on, a similar illness plays an important part in the character of Prince Mishkin in his book, The Idiot, partly because of the severity of the condition and its after effects. You have to remember that...

At the time, everybody that had this issue ended up in a grand mal seizure. But in The Idiot, Prince Mishkin, who is the main grace character... is completely aware that he's not an idiot in the pejorative sense. He sometimes concedes the aptness of the word in relationship to his mental state during particularly severe attacks. He occasionally makes reference to the

pre-narrative period prior to his confinement in the Swiss sanatorium, where the symptoms were chronic, and he really was almost an idiot. Paradoxically, It is also clear that aspects of the disease are intimately connected to a profound intensification of his mental faculties and are a significant cause of the development of higher spiritual preoccupations.

That's kind of remarkable. And so I didn't know it, but one of the best writers ever in history had the same left frontal lobe focal point epilepsy. Aren't I special? But you know what? It's been a challenge. It's been a curiosity. And it's been a gift. Inside some of these challenges, there are embedded gifts. And I can tell you two of them.

for me. One is that I live walking on trap doors. I never know when a seizure is going to happen. And that is a constant reminder that control has always been mythological. We'd never have had control. We try to get control, and we'd much rather the imagination of control than the risk of trusting love. And the second thing?

when it started to take down the wall between my intellect and my rationalizations, when it began to take down the wall between my intellect and my emotional world, I began to feel what I already knew. Like, I know I love Kim. I know I love my kids and my grandkids. But now I could feel it in a way that I have never been able to feel it before.

So with all the headaches and the exhaustion that comes from these have been these gifts, has been something that is incredibly, incredibly valuable to me. God could heal me. I know that. God will not do second best. And sometimes we think that physical healing must be the best, even though it's temporary. There are things that last for eternity that are better. than temporal things. Thank you for listening.

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