Day 1

June 19th, 2017

My eyes open and my head still hurts, but it is not a migraine. It is just a headache. Now I am going to have to get all of the alcohol out of my system. My husband and I do not drink alcohol every day, but would drink too much on the weekends or when we would go on vacation. One or two drinks, does not a seizure make, but that’s a dangerous line to cross. The medicines also decrease a person’s tolerance for alcohol, which can also cause them to make poor choices. It’s a slippery slope.

I called my neurologist and left a message with him to call me. I thought about what I would say to him as I made myself a sparkling water with lemon. Then I heated up some dry rice in the microwave, put it in a tube sock and wrapped it around my neck.

In Seth Haine’s book, Coming Clean, he journals his experience choosing not to drink alcohol anymore, and he gets up every morning and “goes into the cave” with God. He gets out his Bible, has devotions with God, and journals his thoughts each day as he tries to answer some tough questions. At what point in his life did his start using alcohol to numb his pain instead of going to God for help? He gets up each morning before anyone is up, and spends some time, writing, talking to God, and reading the Bible looking for answers to his questions. He calls this time “going into the cave” I think because he is digging deep into the past for memories, digging deep inside his himself, and digging into the Scripture for evidence.

Some of us have memories and emotions that have been buried for years in a cave, and you may not want to excavate yours. But why? Maybe the memories are so painful that you have buried them in your cave. Or maybe we just feel stress from everyday life. And to keep make sure that we forget about the memories, the pain, or the stress, we keep ourselves busy. And then when we need to rest, many of us turn on an electronic device to keep our minds off of the what’s bothering us. And then some of us need more to decompress. We might need to eat, drink, shop, run, play video games, binge watch NetFlix, and so forth. The list is endless really. As Seth says, “I suppose we’re all drunk on something.” And he may be right.

So like Seth’s book, this is not a really a book about alcoholism. This is not a really a book about epilepsy. It is about what is underneath it all. When I experience stress or pain I, up until yesterday, would seek a quick remedy, one that can easily be filled at any grocery or liquor store—a chilled bottle of Chardonnay or a glass of whiskey and diet coke on the rocks.

But years of drinking more than I should at times has not helped my health. Neither has the fact that I have had several concussions from riding my bike. I raced my road bike for several years when my husband and I met, and I never learned how to crash without hitting my head. Needless to say, I do not race anymore. I have Catamenial Epilepsy, so my hormones are also a trigger for my seizures. I keep a close eye on the calendar during days 9-13 and 27-28 because these are the days when either my estrogen could spike, or there may be a disproportion between my estrogen and progesterone, which could cause a seizure.

I need to get the toxins out of my body. A kale yogurt smoothy with some blueberries . . . okay, where did I put the Ninja?