Altered Consciousness

At rare times when fear, furiousness, and frustration ebb as the dominant emotions that I associate with episodic altered consciousness, curiosity rises to fill the void. Moments of clarity bring not only a rush of sensation and cognitive potential, but also a stream of questions concerning my identity and what my precarious situation implies about it. Clearly, at this moment, ‘I’ refers to me, the one who can read a chapter of a book and remember it for longer than three seconds. Surely, it refers to the man who can taste his food, and smell it toו. And it refers to the guy who can play a modest amount of music, has respectable mathematical abilities, and craves independence.

Half a year later, the world, still, likely neither requires nor desires another self-indulgent report on the tragedies befalling my brain and the ludicrous circus that constitutes the effort to revive it. However, participating in the act of writing is vital to rediscovering the connections that have long lain dormant between my ailing neurons. If I sound whiny and pathetic, I have earned that right and make no apology for it; in fact, I preemptively retract any apology that I might make for it in the future.

I had hoped not to return so soon to the topic of my changing brain. Interfering with my ability to write about anything else, it had other ideas.

Yesterday I was bombarded by the sorts of sensations I described in my last post. The experience was overwhelming and somewhat incapacitating. Since these odd feelings initially appeared as I began to improve, I took the correlation for granted. While there is a basis for this idea, I should probably be less of a zealot.

I’m roughly four months into my recovery. Several weeks ago I created this site so that I could write about my experiences both suffering and recovering from an autoimmune encephalopathy. As I got better, I thought, this would become a forum for other thoughts and essays, even those unrelated to brain disease. But the initial goal was to capture some artifact of my experience.