ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 13
“It smelled like death to me,” I tell her.
“What? Why?”
“Because having a seizure is like dying and then coming back to
life.”
“Uh, what now?”
My friend turns towards me, staring at me like I’d sprouted three
sober, grim-faced heads.
“You lose your consciousness and then your memory. When you
wake up, you can’t remember what happened. So you panic. You
feel . . . powerless.” I pull for the words. “And your body is weak and
you can’t walk and your head is fuzzy and you can’t think. You lose
every other thing that people say to you, and then slowly, slowly you might remember things. Pieces. Sometimes people’s faces,
sometimes the year. Sometimes you can’t remember the year, which
is terrifying enough on its own.”
“How can you even deal with that?”
She’s quickly come to terms with my three heads and now is focused on their casual, serious expressions.
I shrug.
“It’s scary. But it’s not really that big of a deal.”
Twenty
I have a panic attack after. It won’t stop. As the ambulance winds
around the urban hills, I:
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