Sunday morning....NY Times (is now physically 1.5" smaller, that'll take some getting used-to), breakfast and coffee.

I guess I left off at the late-june seizures. I returned to Boston a few days later and resumed my regular routine. The meds stayed the same and I had the VEEG scheduled for the third week of July, which I was actually now eager to go to after the last seizure. I continued to do my thing at work but it was now different. For some reason I was less apt to deal with the distractions at work than I used to be. I couldn't tell if this was a side-effect from the medicine or a pre-occupation with my health. I tried to pin down the variables as to why I'm more stressed and all I could come up were those two; I was the variable that changed and it becoming increasingly difficult to balance it out with the rest of my life (family, work, friends, future).

Then I thought that I may be thinking too much about epilespy; but it was just hard not too. Because of the new medicine I was constantly taking self-diagnostic "readings" as in, "how I am feeling right now" or "can/should I do ". My professional life was okay but I feared that I was too spacey or too agitated for my co-workers comfort-level. The work I could still perform but I seemed to be ever more distracted by the sound in my work environment. This was especially present at the end of the workday. My theories behind this were: keppra level dropping as the PM dose approached and plain-old stress.

The Video EEG in the Lahey Clinic happened on schedule and was productive from the standpoint of monitoring seizure activity: I gave them two. To reach this they took away the meds and kept me awake nearly 40 hours. I watched a lot of AMC which was showing Godfather 1 and 2 and then late at night one flew over the cuckoo's nest; the irony and synchronicity of this programming choice nearly sent the neurons flying. Nicholson faking his dose of dilantin in the film while they with-hold mine; good times.

I did bring in a cinematographer friend of mine, Patrick, with an HD video camera to interview me from my hosptial bed. Patrick asked great questions to me and to my parents which sometimes unexpectedly sent the emotions flying. The night before the morning of my seizure, the same night i was watching these movies on tv, Patrick had left the HD camera mounted adjacent to the hospital's video camera in a time-lapse mode. I did not have it on when the seizures did happen and I hope to have access to the hospital's footage (though it's not HD).

After the back-to-back seizures they gave me atavan (twice) and I slept for about twenty hours. I was released the next afternoon.