Diagnosis

After a serious illness in March 2020, everything accelerated. My wife began recording my episodes and showing them to me. Seeing myself from the outside was a shock, an unwanted mirror, but an awakening.

On August 29th, 2022, I messaged this to my physician:

The episodes are impossible to explain; it’s almost as if I experience a sixth sense during the 1 to 2 minutes I have them, and whilst I understand everything going on around me, I cannot verbally reply. The longer my wife and I have been married the more she notices them.¹

During my appointment, a seizure hit, as if my brain refused to stay silent any longer. I can only imagine what my physician was thinking in that moment.

Two days later, I had an MRI. Before I even made it home, the results landed on my phone:

Contracted T2 hyperintense left hippocampus consistent with mesial temporal sclerosis.

A single sentence that changed everything.

In a panic I spent several weeks researching what this meant, and the news was not good.

It’s easy to overlook the luck in this story, because it set in motion the future I needed. None of it would have happened without my wife’s concern, or my physician’s willingness to take me seriously in that moment.

This marked the beginning of a new chapter, and the hardest three years of my life.