This little piece was something I wrote for an ezine back in January 2011. I was struggling for money and needed a portfolio, so writing quick articles for various ezines was my then-current solution whilst I looked for jobs outside of my bedroom.
I'm not sure why I chose to write this, as inspiration, or maybe I was bored. who knows? But I kinda like it, even if it's a bit bland and lacking some description. I've improved in 18 months. Honest.
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In the year of 1996 I was diagnosed with epilepsy caused by a benign (non-cancerous) tumour on the left side of my brain. MRI scans showed that it was about the size of a golf ball.
A year after the scans and many tests I had my first operation for a tiny sample to be taken and tested but the tumour couldn’t be removed due to the high possibility that I’d lose the ability to speak.
After the op and being released I spent the next 7 years having a seizure on an almost daily basis. I only recently found out that I was having what is known in the psychology and medical worlds as a “musical seizure” as I would hear familiar music seconds before it kicked in. I could never figure what the song was though, much to my annoyance, and, still to this day, I have no idea what it was.
When I turned 15, we got the results back from my most recent MRI and were told that now my brain had grown, the tumour had shifted a little and it could now be removed. What a feeling that was! So, after much planning, excitement and packing, my family and I set off to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London for two very special operations which were, and possibly still are, performed only twice a year by a team of incredibly skilled surgeons.
Filled with nerves and excitement (not forgetting teenage testosterone), we were guided to what would be my bedroom for the next three weeks. I’d be living in an average sized room with a metal-framed bed, my own toilet and marble floors with a large window sill I could sit on while listening to SlipKnot with my family in the background complaining about ‘that racket‘.
After a long week of being injected with needles, attached to machines, having blood taken away from me and asking the nurse if my operation could be filmed (that wasn’t possible but they did take some interesting photos), it was finally time to travel to my operating theatre.
Nervously, I sat on my bed, talking and laughing with my parents before the anaesthetic kicked in and I slowly fell into a deep sleep which still couldn’t be beaten today.
Skip forward to around five long hours later and my eyes are flickering open to find myself lying on a bed in a long room filled with children of all ages on both sides of the room who had also recently had an operation.
However, my tumour wasn’t gone just yet. This five hour op was, in fact, to put a number of electrodes attached to a square of thin latex over the tumour so my seizures for a week could be monitored and analysed to see what was really going on inside that cranium of mine.
For a week I was sat on my bed with a bandage around my head which happened to have a load of wires poking out, attached to a strange-looking machine. Through this whole week I was forced to take this machine with me to the toilet, sleep with wires in my head and spend time with my family looking like some sort of robot on charge. It was an interesting week, to say the least.
After the week was up, it was time to go back to theatre to have the electrodes removed and the tumour cut out to be sent off to the labs for scientific research. Or so I imagine.
Repeat the anaesthesia injection and the falling asleep with my mum holding my hand procedure and I’m back on the operating table with my head cut open and the surgeons fiddling away and again, five hours later, I’m lying in bed except this time there are no wires poking out of my head, my brain has lost some weight and my tumour is sat in a jar somewhere.
From what I remember, the doctor telling us that the tumour had successfully been removed with no complications was one of the best-feeling moments of my life. It was like a weight had been lifted and we no longer had to worry about certain things.
I spent the next week in hospital recovering and gaining my strength back along with mass consumption of macaroni cheese, my food obsession at the time and finally, on the seventh day we were packed and walking out of that room, but not before a nurse came into the room with a disc which had ‘Peter Kent G.O.S.H’ written on it. My photos! These would be interesting to see when we got home and still are seven years later.
Since the op I have had the odd seizure here and there but that’s nothing compared to one every day.
It’s now January 2011 and I’m now writing this article and about to begin my second semester of my first year of university, something that had never crossed my mind back in 2003. How our paths change. I suffered from a serious illness and now, here I am, writing articles and studying a degree in English literature and creative writing.
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