Publisher's Synopsis
Dedication to Chi, The State of Zen Energy of Death and Life, this book is dedicated to the memory of Mister John Stohr, a teacher of Social Studies I had back in the late 1970s that died in a fiery auto accident in 1980. A decade ago, I got permission from his 93-year-old Mother: Angelina Stohr, to dedicate an epilepsy memoir to him. It is doubtful if she reached age 100, but God Bless you Angelina, wherever you are now. Mister Stohr's epilepsy tale is a hard one to believe...The RNS, responsive neural stimulator, E lady gets canned for indecent exposure and public masturbation while in a seizure. I'll make this quick in my Unholy resurrections' dark fiction fantasy series there's a stuck-up snobbish, overaged tramp who was into public indecent exposure and public doing that thing that the Jesus Saves All church wouldn't approve of but she wasn't going to stop because it felt too darn good. Public pubic masturbation, back to the story...There was a documentary on PBS, the title was Brain Lightning Storming, inside the brain 101. It was directed by a female journalist who was only diagnosed a few years back. Just for sake of a name, we'll call her Antonia. Doc Penovich was one of the interviewees, she said that in a complex-partial seizure the patient might remove their clothing or engage in sexual impropriety with themselves, it doesn't take a college degree to translate that into masturbation. Back on track Mr. Miller... Antonia was at work, she went into a seizure, took all her clothes off and began masturbating but she didn't even know where she was, let alone what her brain was making her body do. Antonia received her pink slip the next day, she was canned for indecent exposure and public masturbation. She was researching and came across something called a responsive neural stimulator-RNS-the responsive neural stimulator is implanted within the skull, between the skull and the brain, there are electrodes that are snaked way down into the brain, its onboard computer starts mapping your seizure activity generating your epilepsy profile. The way it works is sort of like a couple of magnets, put south and south together and they repel. With the RNS, just in case you're interested it is called a Neuropace www.neuropace.com when you start to have a seizure, it gives you a series of little jolts that block the seizure. Antonia had the surgery, the device is made by Neuropace, based in Mountain View, Calif. The company says each RNS Stimulation system will cost between $35,000 and $40,000, she must have convinced her insurance company that the Neuropace was a medical necessity and in the end, she'd be on a lot fewer meds so it was a win and win situation. Doc P wanted me to have one, even talked to the surgical team and had gotten an okay. This recounts my life with epilepsy, life problems I've faced and overcome, an alcohol addiction, a misdiagnosis of active paranoid schizophrenia, active diagnosis of stress anxiety syndrome and active diagnosis of stress-induced panic attacks. If I'm in a large group I sometimes freak out and have to take a break for 30 seconds or five minutes and decide to re-join the group or just chill out the rest of the meeting-I'm talking our writer's group-sometimes I have to chill until my friend Walt and I leave. I was referred to my first of many neurologists, a woman I fictitiously call: Rory O'Rourke. At one of our first appointments in 1974; she had said the following. "I've seen these many times before. When adolescence ends, your seizures will stop," my first neurologist, Rory O'Rourke, said. Rory was a doppelganger for the actress Maureen O'Hara, that would have been in the mid-1970s if we're going to go Technicolor in 1974 to be precise. The end of adolescence: that was seven, eight years: seven years seemed a lifetime, eight: eternity. So began the mounting frustration and exasperation with the medical profession...
