I have arrived.

More or less anyway. And my heels freaking hurt. Guess it could be worse. At least I'm feeling my emotions more. Plus, over the last few days, I've been researching the brain a lot. I'm a little scared of myself and information always makes me feel better. What did I learn? Well...

• I have temporal lobe epilepsy. Knew that already.
• I get auras. Knew that, too. Though I didn't know that an aura was considered a simple sort of seizure. I get the auditory and visual hallucinations, plus the weird feeling in my stomach and tingling in my head and panic, mostly because I know what's going to happen and, even though I can't articulate it at the time, I know exactly the longer-term impacts once it's happened.
• The good news is that a seizure of the length I typically have doesn't result in brain damage. There are many reasons that a person could have seizures, most notably prior brain damage/head trauma, lesions, tumors, etc. I suspect that it has a lot to do with me being a SIDS baby, since depriving the brain of oxygen can cause seizure disorders later, even if they don't show up for years afterward like mine did.
• Another interesting thing is that the structure of an epileptic's brain may be different from a normal person's brain. No surprise given the above statements. But apparently there are more nodes in many epileptics' brains, which can lead to more frequent and stronger synaptic stimulation.

All this is interesting from a purely academic standpoint. It doesn't change what happened, doesn't actually help anything. But it does force me a little to realize how fortunate I am. Although my blood composition appears to have been permanently altered thanks to pregnancy and childbirth (I had been on this higher dose of estrogen beforehand with no problems, but apparently after birth adding just 10 more micrograms can screw you up), I know what's causing it and can fix it. I can even just go off the contraceptive entirely and lower my meds again, though since I'm already on it, I don't want to keep switching back and forth. I'm not sure what that would do.

Still, a lot of people aren't lucky enough to be able to pinpoint something and say, "There's the problem," and have to live with regular seizure activity no matter what they do, and the social stigma that accompanies it. Me, I just get what is hopefully a wakeup call, not to be repeated for several more years, if that. This is my first unprovoked seizure (minus the eclampsia) for seven years. Hopefully next time I have one (and I'm not kidding myself - it'll happen), I can say the same thing, only minus the eclampsia.

I'm going to try to stop yammering about my brain now. There are more important things going on than my fault electrical system misfiring. I may have a job in October, for example, and of course, the economy was long ago set on course to go to hell in a handbasket and the dominoes are falling fast.