July 11, 2007. That's the day we found out the name of the elephant in our room. My wife, Linda, was bipolar.
It's not that we didn't know about coping with bad things because we did. Linda had been born with epilepsy. Seven years ago a good day was 10-15 grand mal seizures and she didn't have too many good days. She tried medicine after medicine to little effect. Sometimes it was not clear if the seizures were worse than the side effects of the medicines that she took. Hope was always fragile, always resting in the next new thing that was soon replaced by another next new thing. Life for Linda was like living in a cloud. There was one big difference though. Clouds go away.
Finally she got hurt really bad. She fell down a flight of stairs during a seizure, hit her face on the banister and literally broke her face. She looked like I had taken a baseball bat and beaten her half to death. She used to tell me that she couldn't go to the store because people would stare at her. I'd tell her no-they are staring at me trying to figure out what kind of monster I am to do that to you.
The neurologist finally figured out what we already knew. No medication was going to help. He told us that brain surgery was the only option. She had her amygdala and hippocampus removed and the seizures went away-for a short time.
When they did come back they came back with a vengeance. Four years later she was in Vanderbilt Hospital having close to 100 seizures a day. Now finally the seizures seem under control. They are still there, but no longer does Linda tell people what kind of day she had by giving them the seizure count.
The surgery though took Linda to a place she had never been before. Disabilities that had never existed prior to the surgery took control of her life. Her memory was shot and because of that she begin to have problems learning. She couldn't concentrate. She loved to read all her life, but sometimes found that now she had no comprehension. She became noise sensitive. Noise at times-any noise-was at times physically painful. She could get lost going from one room to the other. And that was only the tip of the iceberg. One doctor told her she now had a new label-traumatic brain injury.
But there was something else wrong and we knew it. Linda was a good and a kind person, but at times she was seemingly drowned in moods that overtook her and hijacked her to a place that sometimes we wondered if she was coming back from. We explained it in terms of seizures, of surgery and when all else failed medicine side effects. There were so many explanations that we never bothered to look right in front of us. There were a lot of red flags, but we were color- blind. Even when there was nothing "physically wrong" something was always in the way. Hope seemed a cruel delusion, always being dashed for reasons that we never clearly understood, but seemingly always present. Life sometimes seemed like little more than waiting for the next bad thing to happen. Even though we couldn't see the elephant we knew he was there. All we had to do was look at the path of destruction he left.
