When Your Partner Has a Seizure
Dave is fine now, but what a scary night it was.
“Well, I'm going to go finish that email,” Dave said, striding back to the door. “Oh, hey,” he called over his shoulder, pausing in the doorway to look back at me. “You want another cup of decaf?”
I considered. I always wanted coffee, but I was in the middle of a TMJ flare. That meant sticking to room-temperature water only. “No, it'll make my jaw hurt,” I said reluctantly. “But thank you, though! Love you!”
“Love you, too,” he said lightly, pulling the door closed behind him, leaving me on the screened-in porch off the kitchen. Through the sheer ivory curtain on the door, I watched his filmy outline as he settled himself at the round glass kitchen table, his work station since we had arrived at his parents’ nearly two months ago. His laptop, piles of books and journals, a smattering of various Mountain Dew cans, and a magnificently overstuffed salad bowl full of all kinds of beef jerky and gummy candy kept him powering through, writing and researching and networking away, all day long. This, I'm told, was how he used to work before PTSD came crashing down on his ability to focus.
And I love this about him, by the way - the exuberance. I like that gummy candy is an item on my grocery list. My first husband honest-to-God prefers to take a salad of just iceberg lettuce and cheese to work each day for lunch. What? Iceberg lettuce is objectively terrible! I'd make each one the night before and stick it in the fridge, sometimes sneaking in unwelcome additions like celery or diced green pepper and onion. Surely he wanted a little flavor, a little fun? But no. Invariably I'd think, as I tossed pale green and white chunks together with artifically-orange shredded cheddar, “What kind of a psychopath have I married, who looks forward to some iceberg lettuce?” No, give me a man who unapologetically asks me to buy a $12 bag of gummy Lifesavers - and devours it in three days.
This Wednesday evening, it was about 11:00. Back home, he'd have been asleep for hours by now, but he hadn't been sleeping much lately. I've always been a night owl, though the meds I was taking for my throbbing jaw were making me sleepy that night. I was reading some article in Slate, thinking I'd probably finish my cigarette and go to bed, when I heard a crash.
And then there came another one. About two seconds later, I jumped up and burst inside.
Despite being an almost Pollyannish optimist, I've been generally expecting something bad to happen to someone since I was a little girl. It's a function of growing up with a very sick parent. When I was eight, there was a list stuck to the fridge explaining the steps I should take “if Dad doesn't wake up.” Thankfully, he didn't “not wake up” until I was 26, and I wasn't there to need to know what to do. But I've always kept a reminder pinned to the fridge in my mind: Car accident. Stroke. Sudden heart attack. Don't assume these things won't happen, Sally, because they will. At some point, they will.
“Seizure,” though, was not on my radar.
And I'd never seen one before. Yet, with one glance at my fiancé, I was sure this was what I was looking at. There he was on the floor, lying on his back, shaking - convulsing uncontrollably. His pupils were so enormously dilated that I couldn't see the cognac color of the irises at all - it was as if his eyes were two pools of black ink. His face turned from a deep red to an alarming gray before my eyes; his lips were purple.
Just that afternoon, I had been gazing dreamily at the soft chiffon rose of his cheeks, trying to imagine that color rendered as a nail polish, or dyed onto a scarf. Now I was watching the color gradient change in real time: there was no way to describe it but gray. Hypoxic, my brain offered helpfully - a word I'd had little cause to use before, but had clearly retained somehow. My heart leapt into my throat. What was I supposed to do?
I pictured taffy being stretched as moments expanded in which I could only watch him helplessly. As he shuddered and shook, he lay mostly on his back, with his feet and ankles locked into place around the legs of the table. They'd have been there when he fell; it's where he props his feet while he works. The chair he'd been sitting in had overturned; his work was scattered.
His hands were fists knotted with bulging veins; his arms had contorted and contracted painfully. He seemed to be breathing, but I wasn't sure how - some kind of reddish liquid was slopped over his cheek and moustache. Had he thrown up blood? Was that something that happened during a seizure? Saliva frothed and bubbled at his mouth, and he clearly couldn't talk. Could he hear me? Could he see me? I didn't know. I thought he was dying.
I lay my hand and forearm over his spasming chest. The black Nightmare Before Christmas sweatshirt he wore was absolutely soaked, and underneath it, I could feel his heart ricocheting around in his chest.
“You're going to be okay,” I said, having no basis for this assessment at all. “I'm going to go get your mom.”
She was clearly horrified, but it took her only a brief moment to appraise the situation. “Let's get him on his side,” she said, and we turned him toward me. It was hard. Dave is not a big guy, but he is very strong, and we were fighting whatever forces were locking his body so rigidly. I had to pull him by the hem of his sweatshirt to finish turning him. Only later would we notice our efforts had torn a deep, snarling gash into his shin.
His mother said, “I wonder if he can breathe.”
“I don't know. He's - he's gray, and his lips are purple. But he's still … I don't know. Should I call 911?” I asked.
She crouched down over him and jammed her fingers into his mouth. “This way he won't choke,” she said. I nodded - of course. I should've known that. “911?” I asked again. I had never seen a seizure before; I had no idea how serious this was.
Breathless ourselves, we studied him as he lay on his side. Rings of brown began to appear around his dark pupils. They became wider. Then the horrible locked-up, juddering contractions became wider, too, less rigid, a bit slower. He was still heaving, but maybe the convulsion part of the seizure was ending. I thought of that stretched-out taffy again - time had ballooned. From the first crash that I heard to the moment when the violent attack began to release him, maybe 45 seconds had elapsed. Certainly no more than a minute.
“Can you follow my finger?” I asked, passing it from right to left in front of his eyes. He tracked it well. Maybe he'd be OK, I thought, wanting to cry with relief. But he still couldn't talk.
His mother went to get his father, and I busied myself wiping his face. Something red was still streaked over his cheek and through his beard. Wildly I thought that Dave might have bitten apart his tongue - that maybe that was why he wasn't talking - until I noticed a can of V8 juice on the table, knocked onto its side.
“You were drinking this?” I asked, holding it up. In answer, he blinked twice, very deliberately, maintaining eye contact with me - but still not speaking. Oh, God, I thought, what if he has brain damage? What if he had bitten part of his tongue? What if he cracked his head when he fell? What if - I realized that I didn't even know what to be afraid of, and a terrible frisson danced around my ears and neck.
His father emerged at the top of the staircase and strode over, settling himself at the table to look up first aid for a seizure. “I think we've got to get him to the hospital,” I said again.
“Or at least call the ER and see what they say,” his mother put in.
“Now, let's hang on here,” his dad said, parsing the Google results. He stood up again to put Jasmine outside on the porch - where had she been until then? I found I had no idea.
On the floor, Dave was starting to roll around, on purpose this time, trying to get up. “No, no; you stay where you are. Take it easy. Go get a pillow for him,” he said, and his mother disappeared, bringing one back and setting it under his head. I pulled him up by the shoulders and lowered him back down onto it. As we waited, I crouched over him, rubbing his chest and stomach. His parents deliberated.
It turns out that not every seizure is a 911 emergency. It turns out that one in ten people will experience seizures at some point in their lifetimes. It turns out that lots of things can cause seizures, including - terrifyingly - such common events as exhaustion, dehydration, and a lack of food.
Dave hadn't been sleeping well. When he drank, it was caffeinated beverages only - I'd been surprised to see the can of V8. And he eats so strangely - either like a bird or like an elephant. He hadn't had much that day. So, combining those facts with the recent changes to his psychiatric medications, it was determined that this made sense in some ways, and a midnight ER visit was, thus, unnecessary.
I was incredulous. But did I know better than a retired doctor? Of course not - I had just realized I didn't even know what to be afraid of.
All of a sudden, David lurched to his feet.
“Hey, hey, Dave - Dave, what are you doing?” his father asked, rising.
“Oh, um, I'm just going to go to bed now,” he slurred, stumbling around the couches and toward the hall that led to the bedroom. “I'm pretty tired.”
His mom and dad walked him to the bedroom and helped him up onto the bed. Feeling very superfluous, I lagged behind. I suddenly noticed that it was raining - I let Jasmine inside. She knew something was wrong, and she bolted for the bedroom.
I heard my father-in-law: “Hey! Hey! No! Get out of here! Out! Sally?”
“I'm coming!” I answered, to the sound of the bedroom door closing. “Come here, baby girl.” Jasmine galloped back out to the living room, where she settled with me on a loveseat, her lively brown eyes peering up at me, not understanding. Why would Grandpa, her favorite person, tell her “no?” And why couldn't she jump up on the bed and lick Daddy? After all, that was her go-to move when Dave was having trouble, and she'd never been turned away. She put both paws on my chest, looking at me intently.
“It's okay, Jazzy-bug,” I told her, petting her back, scratching her ears. “Daddy had an accident. He's going to be OK, but he needs to rest right now.” I like to tell myself that she understands, just a little bit, when something's really important.
I put her in the enclosed back porch with a Busy Bone: she'd be protected from the rain, but out of the way. She wasn't happy, but I had to go check on my David.
In the bedroom, his parents stood, listening, as he lay on the bed, talking to them about something at great length - what exactly, I don't know. Dazed myself, I climbed up onto the bed and arranged myself behind him, rubbing his back, his thighs, his knees, accidentally grazing the spot on his shin where the ugly black gash from the table leg was still exposed. It was at a weird angle; I hadn't seen it.
He couldn't help crying out. “Oh, my God,” I said. “Honey, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry! I -”
“It's OK,” he responded, wincing. Heroically, he waited a couple of beats before managing to say, “Sally, maybe you should go check on Jasmine.”
“Oh. Of course,” I said, getting down. “I’ve got a call in at your doctor's office,” I said lamely, “so I'll … I guess I'll come let you know when they call back.” OK, said everyone.
I walked back out to the cavernous living room. I let Jasmine inside. We both sat down on the loveseat again, and I let her lick my face instead of Dave's as I dissolved into tears.
I was crying because of … what, exactly? Stress, certainly. Relief, of course. And pure pain that was enough to make me cry on its own: TMJ is like someone driving an ice pick into your face. But really, I was upset because I felt helpless, and I wanted to be needed.
As I sobbed into Jasmine's soft cookies-and-cream chest, I recognized how desperately glad I was that this had happened here, at my in-laws' house, rather than out in the middle of the desert, where we were alone. And sometimes, you just need your parents! I didn't begrudge David that: I wanted him to have whoever and whatever would comfort him. Plus, he needs you every day, my rational self pointed out. And sometimes you need a break from that! Let them handle this.
I wiped my eyes and looked down at Jasmine. She whimpered and thumped her tail on the loveseat. I knew she was becoming distressed now.
Sometimes, you just need your parents. I might not be the best person to help David right now, but I could be there for our own little girl. Sniffling, I began to pet her and talk to her. Someone did need me, and right then, that was enough.