Epilepsy Memoir: A 45-year epilepsy Zen detour 1--A Detour From the "Normal Life" Gentlemen, Line Up Your Cars, Start Your Engines, Green Flag, Gun Your Engines, Go! The genesis of epilepsy, the beginning of the Electric Highway and the ups and downs of epilepsy, depression, correctly diagnosed stress anxiety syndrome and correctly diagnosed panic attacks syndrome and misdiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, supposedly all three-psyche nonsense are active which is a load of frozen hockey pucks, Doctor Fitzpatrick White, my first neurologist, said "I've seen these many times before. When adolescence ends, your seizures will stop." My seizures will stop when adolescence ends; that was seven or eight years; seven years seemed a lifetime, eight years seemed an eternity. So began the mounting frustration and exasperation with the white coats--the medical personnel--and later on those dad-ratted Neuro-psych people in 2001, in 2003, and in 2013. That statement has echoed in my mind during a 40-year prolonged adolescence. The brain is like a car's engine--it controls what we do and where we go and some of us have faulty electrical systems. In adolescence, testosterone shifted my brain into overdrive and flicked the seizure switch that controlled the firing of my spark plugs to the off position--it has remained there for over four decades. At the end of my sixth-grade-year during the hot summer of 1974, my engine overheated and I had two tonic-clonic--known at the time as grand mal--seizures.

At the time I experienced ictal (seizure) amnesia. So began a 45-year-quest for successful seizures control on Epilepsy's Static Electricity Highway. The fictitiously named Doctor Fitzpatrick White died in 2007 of liver cancer. Memories of events prior to that time became vague and uncertain--except for certain notable exceptions. In third grade, my crush on Cindy--a redheaded, emerald-eyed girl--and in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, Stefanie--a sapphire-blue-eyed blonde, with perfect teeth who filled my thoughts and dreams.