I have a silver bracelet with the standard medical cadeuseus symbol on the
outward side. I took a pic of it just now and left it here:
http://plug.
(You can also see the huge gash on my forehead from a seizure a few weeks
ago where I gashed my forehead on a piece of furniture during a 4 AM fugue.)
I pretty much gave up on the idea of etching my life story on the inside
surface, so on the inside it just says
EPILEPSY
SEE CARD IN WALLET
The idea is, if someone is going to rifle through my pockets anyway to see
who I am, I'll print the info on a credit-card sized card and stick it in
the wallet's photo slot. EPILEPSY - complex partial seizures - secondary
generalization - SEIZURES LAST SEVERAL MINUTES - DO NOT CALL 911; NOT
NECESSARY - meds 600mg Lamictal / 800 mg Trileptal address 911 Bing Drive
yak yak yak etc etc etc. It also says to call my wife's cellphone.
I'll give myself credit for being articulate but still I don't know how to
warn people about possible fugues on a little card, in so many words, with
no fear of it backfiring. So the card doesn't say anything about those.
They've gotten worse since I last updated it.
That card worked once, sort of. So I always have to bore everyone with this
same story, where the first thing I remembered was waking up in the
ambulance and a woman saying, "Don't worry, we read your little card and
know everything." (I'm obviously paraphrasing, but something like that.) And
I say "sort of", because whoever called 911 on their cellphone obviously
didn't read the card as they drove past.
The ambulance driver recognized me, from having picked me up at my house two
days before. He said, "hey, I know you, we picked you up for a seizure on
Friday night! I live right next to you!" So that was interesting. (In
retrospect, riding a bicycle during a seizure cluster is crazy, but I wasn't
aware of the cluster I was in.)
The lady then asked me, OK, where do you want us to take you? (There are a
bunch of hospitals around here.) I kept saying I wanted to go over to his
place (ha) but she kept saying, "Well, we could, but that would definitely
be AMA." I was kind of delirious (and had the other injuries) so I said "OK
whatever" and they took me to a hospital; later someone handed me a phone
and walked away. I called my wife at home and surprised her. I didn't even
know what hospital ER I was in (nobody was around, and I was still strapped
to a board) and being delirious I forgot to mumble that before hanging up.
(It turned out to be the off-network Kaiser Permanente near here that we
never go to.) She had to do emergency detective work to find the ER with me
in it. I sometimes wonder how other people can get along without exciting
things happening in their lives.
Jason
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe
No comments:
Post a Comment