My Brain in Battle
By Julie Southworth
Tonight’s fight begins in a basement classroom of Berkeley City College near the end of a class on multicultural American literature. But I don’t remember any of that. All I know is that light, too much of it, presses against my pupils.
Three people dressed in blue jackets and pants loom over me, not enough to push back the light. A fourth sits next to me. She says, “Are you . . . Can you . . .” Her words slide off my eardrums. I turn around in my chair, away from her noise, and see it on the floor: a duffle bag, neon orange.
Someone called 911. I’ve had a seizure.
I first heard of someone having a seizure when I was fifteen. I don’t remember her name, just that no one was laughing.
I spent my sophomore year of high school seated at my desk—legs together, eyes down—shielded from classmates’ snickers. After the girl had a seizure, I could hear them whispering: ”Did you know? Did you see?” Their tongues’ swishes surrounded me, embraced me.
I was jealous of the girl and her seizure. I wanted to know that people talked about me without laughing.
No one’s laughing tonight.
Maintaining freedom from the EMTs requires remembering. Whiteboards covered in black and red scribbles hang on the walls. Rows of desks bolted onto plastic chairs surround me. I’m at school.
Losing freedom starts in an ambulance, continues in a hospital with its pupil-pounding fluorescent lights.
I tell the EMTs it’s just a seizure, I’ve had them before, I know what to do. Or I try to. Something between the words and my intention strangles the sounds. I lunge forward, pull in my abdomen, heave one word out: “Seizure.”
Now the EMTs know that I know what’s happening.
I know more than they know. I just can’t say it.
I know wishing for seizures when I was fifteen did not cause tonight’s. Epilepsy does not swell up inside you if you close your eyes, cross your fingers, and dream. I knew that when seizures tore me from my sleep two years after that high school girl had hers. I’ll know that when an epileptologist, thirty-five years later, points at the culprit on my MRI: a gray matter heterotopia, a lump of neurons pushed out of place in utero. I’ll know my fifteen-year-old self did not cause my seizures when a neurosurgeon warns of more heterotopias, hiding from the hospital’s appliances, battering my brain. Heterotopias, not teen loneliness, birthed my epilepsy.
Tonight, I miss loneliness.
Maintaining freedom from the EMTs also requires a third party, someone who will convince them I’ll be safe, someone who will take me home, away from the light. But how will I tell them Brian, my partner and emergency contact, only responds to phone numbers he recognizes, and then only to texts, and if I give the EMTs my phone, how will I show them the password, and they do know my I.C.E. contact is for “in case of emergency” and not the immigrant police, right?
My seizure won’t let me say the password, but I can stab it onto the screen with my fingers before pushing it into one of the EMT’s hands.
I don’t remember how, but I must have barked out something about texting and Brian or I.C.E. because now I see that EMT with his hands wrapped around my phone, tapping it with both thumbs. Two of the other EMTs circle their hands around my upper arms and pull me up.
Hallelujah, I hope.
The EMTs steer me out the classroom door, around the hall, through an atrium lined with students, basking in more light.
I dart my eyes up, down, straight ahead. Away from the other students and their light. I won’t remember how they looked when they looked at me. Whether they laughed or whispered.
The EMTs lower me onto a plastic chair across from the glass doors at the school’s front entrance. Now I can do what I’ve wanted to do since I knew I had a seizure: look outside, away from the light.
When I watch my epileptologist’s computer light up my MRI, the heterotopia that shoved this seizure through my brain will appear as a grey smudge. When I look for it, I’ll lose it among my brain’s grey cerebral folds. I’ll wish I could find the heterotopia. I’ll wish I could forget being fifteen.
Julie Southworth (she/her) is a disabled poet and writer living in Berkeley, CA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Forum, Milvia Street Art and Literary Journal, and Colossus:Home. A Center for Cultural Innovation grant recipient, she writes to make her chronic illnesses—depression, fibromyalgia, epilepsy—and life, visible.