Tuesday 15 October 2013

Epilepsy Confusion


I don't normally write personal posts on this blog. Today quite unusually I want to share something I wrote for friends and family.  For those who harp on about how if you can type you can work, maybe this should give you an idea of why some of us can't. Readers of my blog will have noticed that my writing activity is erratic to say the least. This is also why.

Epilepsy is only one of my many difficulties. It isn't fully controlled, is unpredictable and every so often results in mild ongoing confusion. While I write about it in a lighthearted way, I don't think an employer would see it as such. 

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I'm back! After a week of seizures and luckily being rescued and looked after by "Supermum", followed by strict resting, I'm starting to feel a bit more like myself again.

This is how it all started:

I phoned Mum to warn her I had suddenly started having seizures and might need her to come down (Social Services Care Package not able to be set up for unpredictable events like this!). We finally decided I was ok to spend the night alone and she might come down the next day if seizures continued.

At 10pm I realised that if I had a lot of seizures in the night I might be confused in the morning. I had the sensible idea to leave notes for my morning carers with clear instructions on who to call if that happened.

I then hit a major snag. I suddenly realised my carers were French and wouldn't understand if I wrote the notes in English!
I then remembered I was bilingual and could write in French. Phew! Disaster averted.
Oh no. Wait a sec. My carers weren't French, they were definitely German. And although I had learned German at school, for some strange reason I couldn't for the life of me remember it right then.
Aha! I then had a cunning plan. I would use an English-German dictionary.
Oh no. Wait. I didn't own an English-German dictionary. Curses!
Aha! Cunning plan B. I would go online and use Google and find a translation program.

Just then a niggling thought which had been bugging me finally thrust its way through my cunning plans and into my mind.
If my carers only spoke German and I couldn't remember how to speak German... How had we been communicating for the past few years??!
It then slowly dawned on me that they were in fact British, had always been British and always spoken English.

I sheepishly phoned "Supermum" and told her I might be getting a tad confused and could she come down before I did something silly?

She arrived a couple of hours later. Hopefully I didn't do anything too strange in the interim!

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