Joshua Richardson

Mr. Bye period 2

                                            The Day I Will Never Forget

In the middle of the day on a bright Sunday afternoon, everything was perfect. I was lying down resting my eyes, while my mom was enjoying the message that the pastor was giving. It probably sounds funny that I was sleeping during church, but I was only nine, and I had to stay up late the night before in order to watch my favorite television show. Back then it seemed like I had a favorite show on every night, because that’s about how much I was staying up late. “Go to bed”, is what I would hear my mom say every night while I was watching TV, and every time I would ignore her as if I were the one in charge. The same went thing went for playing video games. Most of the time I didn’t even feel tired. But I guess my body thought differently.

Who would have thought that staying up late would be increasing your chances for something bad to happen, especially when you are catching up on a lot of sleep during church on Sundays. But after a while, that bad thing finally happened. I was sound asleep, when suddenly I woke up and involuntarily started moving. It was as if there was an earthquake inside my body. I didn’t know what to do. All my mom could do was panic and speculate what was happening to her son. Luckily, she obtained some tissue and gave it to me so that I could wipe my mouth. There was spit dripping out of my mouth, which I had no control over. The only thing that I could do was be scared for myself and hope and pray that this episode would end soon. I had no idea what was taking place. All that I could think of was, what’s going on? My body was moving, but I couldn’t control it, as if a demon possessed me. And in church, that’s probably the last thing that you want to be thinking of.

The only thing that I can compare the experience to now is getting hit in football. When you get hit hard enough, you sort of get your bell rung. Just imagine running down the field and you’re about to make the tackle when you’re abruptly hit on the side of your head. On contact, you get slammed to the ground. Everything stops, and you are completely unaware of what is happening. It’s kind of like the old cartoons when one of the characters would put a pan over somebody’s head and bang on it with a mallet. Your head starts throbbing with a headache and you become sensitive to sounds and light. You have no choice but to sit there and endure it.

After the occurrence, I was urgently walked to the door to wait for the ambulance that was called in the wake of my episode. While my mom and I were waiting outside all I could do was contemplate on what had just happened and why. As I reflected back to the seizure, the image of me sitting in the seat shaking kept haunting me. I was able to control my body enough to be able to look around and witness everybody staring in shock, wondering what was wrong with me. Just before my mom helped me out of the sanctuary, the pastor and the other members of the church joined in on a huge prayer for me. It was comforting to know that they cared about my well being so much. Luckily nobody started panicking and had an anxiety attack or something. The last thing that we needed was somebody else being taken to the hospital in an ambulance.

“Do you want the sirens on or off?” the guy in the ambulance asked as I entered. A lot of kids might have said on, because of the ultra cool sound that it makes, but I said off. I didn’t want all of that attention drawn to me. I had already had enough from having a seizure in the middle of a church full of people. I’m not the kind of person that begs for attention anyway. After being the center of attention for a long fifteen minutes, all I wanted to do was get out of the spotlight. I was hoping that my “fifteen minutes of fame” would be over as soon as possible.

On my way to Oakland Children’s Hospital, it dawned on me. I just had a seizure. Not knowing what was wrong with me, I just waited upon arrival to the hospital so that I could be told what was wrong with me from a doctor, or somebody that knew what they were talking about. To make things worse, when I got there, somebody was on the Nintendo, so all that I could do was watch. But maybe that was for the best. After all, that is what had gotten me into the hospital in the first place. Maybe I should slow down and refrain from all the TV and videogames for a while. That’s probably all that popped into my head for weeks. The last thing that I wanted to do was relive that moment again.

“Josh, for this test you have to wake up at four in the morning and not go back to sleep”. When I heard that, I looked at my mom like she was going crazy. Of all the orders you give me, why would you tell me to do something that helped promote that experience. Then she told me that it was in order for a sleeping lab to take tests on me while I slept. I never found out what they did, but hopefully it wasn’t anything weird. All I remember about it is going into a room and lying in a recliner type chair, the kind that dentists use when they drill holes in your gums. The only thing that they told me to do was lay there and go to sleep. I didn’t have any complaints about that. I had to make up for the lost time that my mom stole from me in order to take the test. It was probably the easiest test that I will ever take. All I had to do was lay there and attempt to have a good dream.

From there on, I went on to take even more tests. This time, it was an MRI. I don’t know what that stands for, but it sounds important. The only thing that happens is the technician puts you into this tunnel type thing and takes digital pictures of your brain. Just imagine a pregnant woman having pictures taken of an unborn baby, except it is your brain. It looks like something out of a “Star Wars” movie. During the MRI, a plethora of sounds are released. I can’t recall some of the sounds, but the ones that I can were kind of random. I can compare one of the sounds to a tree falling, if that helps. At the time I wasn’t sure why they would create those sounds. I guess that they were there to show how my brain reacts to particular sounds. As far as I know, my brain is fully functional. So if I am ever in the forest and hear a loud noise, I will be able to decipher whether it is a tree or not.

After a long hard summer, I was finally ready to go back to school, seizure free.

“So Josh, what did you do over the summer?”

“Not much . . . I had a seizure”

That’s not exactly how most people start a conversation when they are talking to their teachers after summer vacation. The rest of the people said that they went to camp or stayed at home. Luckily the teacher was the only person that heard me say that. If my classmates heard me, they probably would have looked at me like I was crazy. Then again, they just might have laughed; fourth graders will laugh at just about anything. Honestly, I think that I kind of had a chip on my shoulder when I went back to school. How many kids can say that they had a seizure over their summer vacation. Its not like I was proud of it or anything, but it was a good conversation starter.