Flirting in Space

Earlier this year, I walked out of a workout class and woke up in an ambulance.

I’d had a seizure. I disregarded the signs as I was leaving—my mind blurred aggressively, and I stepped in and out of consciousness as I put down the weights. I ran out of the class, and that was all I could remember.

My face was bruised, my tongue shredded. I couldn’t eat for weeks. I had knocked my two front teeth out and had to get them pushed back in, wearing braces for three weeks at 24 years old.

Later, I came back for the tests—the EEG, the whole process. When analyzing the results, the doctor told me she didn’t know why it had happened. “Probably just a fluke,” she said.

But I knew deep down it wasn’t. I broke down, on the verge of screaming, desperate for a diagnosis. What was wrong with me?

The doctor called in a senior specialist. They spoke behind closed doors, and when they returned, I learned what would later be known as my fate. The senior doctor informed me they had misread the EEG—I was, in fact, epileptic. He prescribed medication. One for epilepsy, one for depression.

I refused this diagnosis.

I never picked up the medication, and one month later, I was right back where I started.

Same exact occurrence. I walked out of a workout class and woke up in an ambulance.

This time, I took the medication. Since then, it’s been a long journey—a process involving two more seizures before finding the right cocktail to contain it.

How could this happen to me? I asked myself. When did I become the wrong side of a statistic?

How do I learn to live knowing I’ve lost control of my life forever? How do I learn to deal with this every day?

While I’m still learning, I can tell you this: it does get better.

Once you open your eyes and remove the rose-tinted glasses, you see that everyone has their struggles.

Everyone has something. All of us, to some degree, have lost control in some aspect of our lives. I realized how lucky I was that my problem could be managed with two pills a day.

How lucky we all are to wake up every morning and keep fighting, clinging to those rose-tinted glasses. For a while, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to see through them again, but the fog that clouded them months ago has started to fade.

To anyone who feels they may never see through those glasses again—know that it’s universal. We all experience tragedy. And in the end, what’s the point of life if we don’t make the best of it?

Embrace what you can’t change, but fight fiercely for what you can. You are more than any one diagnosis, any one setback. In the end, we each hold the pen to our story, and only you can choose to turn obstacles into strength.