7. Seizures: The Perfect Storm

The combination of conditions that incited my onset of non-epileptic seizures.

If you missed the last post, this one will not make nearly as much sense.

CONTINUED FROM:
—THE DIAGNOSIS - After 24 years, I finally learn what’s going on with my brain.

The Perfect Storm

Non-epileptic seizures are tricky little beasties. Neither Neuro-Land nor Psych-Land fully understand what causes them, there are no tests for them like there are for things like epilepsy and tumors, and they know even less about how to treat them.

But one common factor in many people who experience them is a perfect storm between someone’s personality and nature (often deeply sensitive, kind, and compassionate), how they handle conflict (they are more likely to internalize it rather than lash out at somebody else), and they often have trauma that has significantly impacted them.

As we covered last time, the discovery of this video was the best explanation I’ve ever heard for this neuropsychological disorder. It sparked the lightbulb of AH-HAH while I was devouring a surprisingly delectable cheeseburger in the hospital during my 5-day EEG to discover whether my seizures were epileptic or not.

Short answer: they’re not.

Hells yeah!

But…well, crap. Now what?

Basically, now you get kicked from Neurology and sent back to Psych where you hope that somebody can figure out the equally potent perfect storm of trauma treatments to disarm your short-circuiting system.

When I went in for this EEG, I was already up to my eyeballs in trauma therapy and had been for months—again. I’d already taken my neuropsychologist’s recommendation and done two years of weekly EMDR prior to all the CBT, IFS, art therapy and meditation I do currently.¹ All of this has been great for my PTSD reactions.

But it hasn’t done squat for my seizures, migraines, dizzy spells, blackouts, meltdowns, shutdowns, or tremors. When my brain gets overloaded, I become neurologically symptomatic. Every time we adjust a TMJ splint or change Invisalign trays, my jaw-slamming, tongue-biting sleep-jolts kick up.² Whenever my neck is reinjured, I start having seizures again.

So it’s not like there is no pattern. There are really distinctive patterns, and a bunch of them have nothing to do with my psychological landscape. I’ve been telling doctors, therapists, and instructors what they are for two-and-a-half decades.

Doesn’t mean anybody has a clue what to do about that, or how to stop them except…you know. “Don’t do that.”

• Don’t over-tax my brain. (Good one.)

• Don’t treat my TMJ. (Bzzzt. Thank you for playing.)

• Stop injuring my neck and skull-contents, yo. (Heeeeey! That’s a great idea. Let’s do that!)

So I guess today all we can do is begin our wild goose chase treasure hunt with the map of what caused the seizures to begin with.

(Annnnd now the images are in my head. Wild goose chase. Treasure hunt. You know what kind of treasures you find when you chase geese, right?)

💩😜💩

In 2017, I tore my meniscus. In 2019, I really tore it, exacerbating the original tear into an L that almost ripped a chunk out of it.

As I lived on my couch and computer chair for the next week, I asked myself, “How in the BLEEP did I possibly get here?”

So I started to make a map of my injuries that had put so much strain on that knee that the meniscus eventually tore. Some of those injuries were assaults. The rest were motor vehicle crashes. Ka-BLAM! Damage to my body, brain, heart, and mind.

Once I started mapping the physical injuries, I got on a roll and just kept going because suddenly I was asking one heck of a bigger question than, “How did I wind up here on this couch with a torn meniscus?”

Really, I was asking, “How the heck did I wind up HERE?”

Disabled, twice divorced, destitute, living in Arkansas with barely any friends, income or community?

HOW?

That’s how.

If you want to actually try to make sense of this map, I recommend starting in the top R corner and working your way down to the lower L, then across the bottom row. Or perhaps pick a color and follow the arrows. 🤪😵‍💫😵

Honestly, the specifics aren’t what’s important today—not for anybody but me. This map was one of my many attempts to untangle and decipher the snarled, mixed up, knotted spools of thread in the shaken-and-stirred box that is my Complex-PTSD.

I’ve had to update this map since I first created it in 2019. I just attempted to redo it from scratch, because trying to make the whole thing smaller and squeeze in all the new stuff, as well as wedge in trauma memories I’ve only gotten back in the past few years either through EMDR, reading my journals, or talking to people who have known me for a long time…

It’s a mess.

But that’s the point I’m getting at in sharing it with you. I finally gave up, shoved the new incidents in, and tried to connect as many arrows as possible. We’ll come back to this map later, along with its even more important companion—the counterbalancing healing map. But even looking at the thing in one glance should give you an idea of why my brain keeps short circuiting.

The first time I ever had one of these…events…seizures…episodes…(call them what you will, the impact on the person having them is the same whether it’s caused by epileptic activity in the brain or not). Anyway, they started while I was visiting my parent’s house in Minnesota, nine months after I was smashed into a construction median by a drunk driver.³

The moment it all started, I’d gotten caught in the propwash of every major PTSD-inducing trauma I’d experienced by my age of 28, all in the space of a couple days. Interestingly enough, incidents like being tossed by a tornado⁴ didn’t add any PTSD layers.

Not all traumas do.⁵

These ones did:

THE WEATHER CONDITIONS

8/4/01 - GENERAL LIFE CIRCUMSTANCES

TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY

• I had only just done my first neuropsych test in June. It takes two rounds to give someone my diagnosis: Permanent Traumatic Brain Injury. The first round had shown me the extent of what had been stolen from me by the drunk driver. The second one, 4-6 months later, would show which aspects of the injury were stable and “permanent.”⁶

• When I went home for the class and family reunions, I was still just trying to take it in and accept that this was me now, and that there was a very good chance it always would be.⁷

• I was also still super symptomatic, and hadn’t yet learned the warning signs or how to protect and care for this injury, so I was constantly trying to do stuff I really shouldn’t have been forcing my brain to do.

• I’ve covered my symptoms previously, and we’ll get back to them when TBI is a main post topic. Suffice to say: cognitive, psychological, emotional, and physiological HELL.

BODILY INJURY

• I was out of the neck brace by this time. I was allowed to drive again. (Which was liberating and actually very dangerous, between my brain injury, my eye injury, my PTSD triggers, and my inability to twist and check blind spots.)

• I had a limited capacity to dance. Carefully. But it was still very painful and lopsided. ⁸

• I’ve also covered these symptoms, in over-sharing, over-saturated detail.

• THE SHORT & UN-SWEET LIST:

  • Severe Whiplash

  • Bulging disks

  • Soft tissue damage from neck to hips

  • Reverse curve in my neck vertebrae

  • Twisted vertebrae, pelvis & coccyx

  • Trauma-induced scoliosis

  • Numbness in the limbs

  • Banana-head—har-har—but no, the bones of my skull had gotten compressed when I hit my head, so it was misshapen

  • Traumatic Visual Syndrome - my eyeballs had been stretched out of my skull by the force of the impact, causing all sorts of vision and depth-perception problems

  • Asthma—they were uncertain if it was the damage to my diaphragm or my brain injury causing this. Does it really matter? I still have it.

  • Jeep Butt—I shit you not. Means that I had worn a hole through the skin an inch above my asshole from sitting so much on a twisted coccyx. Apparently you see this in people who do a lot of off-roading in Jeeps, hence its nickname. Who knew? I’ll take their way of acquiring this painful, embarrassing, and annoying malady than my way.

  • Overloaded immune system which caused a host of strange, aggravating, painful, disgusting, and embarrassing maladies. You can read all about it in my Holiday Hell series.⁹

CONSTANT DURESS FROM “THE ENTITIES”

• Car. Insurance. Company. In charge of my medical care.

• Period.

• Oh. You don’t know what that means? Okay. A car insurance company’s job is not to help a person injured in a car wreck to heal. It is to make money. And your existence, if you’ve been injured in a car wreck and now need your insurance company to cough up money for your medical bills, is in direct conflict to this. It was so astoundingly horrible that my mom started writing letters to the Insurance Commission, state representatives, and Dr. Phil in the hopes that somebody—anybody—could do something about this.

• The DA’s office had been informed by the police department, who had been told by the emergency room that there were “no injuries” the night I was rammed by the drunk driver. My name wasn’t even in the file for the DUI case. So I, my family, friends, and medical team had to prove that there was a felony Vehicular Assault case they were missing. That took months of letters, phone calls, emails, and more phone calls.

• Finally, when the drunk driver got a second DUI four months after ramming my life into smithereens, they actually listened.

• Unfortunately, they told me at the last minute that her initial hearing in court would take place…drumroll…while I was in Minnesota. Instead of cancelling my flight and eating the cost, I chose to trust that the DA’s office had finally gotten a clue and was on top of things.

• Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!

• I’m so cute.

• It took over six months for me to finally receive the other half of my lost wages from my car insurance company because I don’t get W-2s for dance performances, and I don’t get 1099s from students. So that took more letters, phone calls, emails, and convincing my plethora of students and employers to go down and get their letters notarized. In other words: herding an entire herd of very sweet cats in tassels, spangles, and sparkles.

• Can I tell you how fun it is to battle all these Entities with one’s family halfway across a continent, while living in chronic pain on a brandy-new TBI?

• When my attorney assessed the video evidence of me dancing two hours before the crash, he transformed into a squirming, blushing, stammering twelve-year-old-boy-in-a-man-sized-suit. Then he began the process of trying to slut-shame me out of a decent settlement.

• Spoiler alert: he succeeded. $37,000 for the destruction of my life on a $100,000 policy. Man, I had that in damages and unpaid medical bills alone. But he “didn’t dare put me in front of a jury” due to the way I dance, so he refused to fight for me.

• Apparently we sluts deserve to be rammed off the road…

• Or something.

• I tried to fire him. But first, I tried to secure a new attorney. No one would take my case because I was already too deep into it with my current snake-oil ambulance chaser.

• There was not a single assistance or disability agency who could help me, because I was not a minor, not elderly, I had no children, I refused to say, “I can’t work another day in my life,” and I hadn’t yet been evicted from my apartment.

• Yet. But I was constantly staring down that barrel while I only received half my lost wages, and it loomed permanently on my horizon once my lost wages ended after a year because…

DAY JOB AND DANCE CAREER LOSS

• At the time of my trip to Minnesota, I was one month out from having to be medically removed from my job as an office manager. I was having constant panic attacks because I kept screwing it up, and because of the brain-strain it put on me. Half the time, I could either drive to work OR work. Not both. Like I said, it was dangerous that they’d given me my driving clearance back.

• But the most important thing—the all-consuming, whip-cracking motivation from nearly every direction—was to get this little malfunctioning cog plugged back into the machine of the Matrix.

• (Spoiler alert: 24 years later, it still is.)

• The night of the car wreck, I obviously lost my ability to teach or perform as a dancer.

• But I was already showing signs that the pessimistic half of my medical team might be wrong. They’d said I would never be a professional dancer again. Hahahahaha—

• Another spoiler: BULLSHIT. Watch me.

• Because in spite of that big list of bodily injuries up there, and in spite of the ways my TBI affected my dancing, there was the other half of my team who assured me that I was actually kind of a miracle-girl with this whole healing thing. IF they could just get my medical care authorized. Instead, my insurance company cut treatments too early, sent me back to work and expected me to drive too soon, and I was under way too much stress and duress.

But not merely from The Entities.

Because there are two other stories amidst all this crap that I’ve never talked or written about publicly.

Until now.

SMEAR CAMPAIGN BY MY “BEST FRIEND” AND DANCE PARTNER

When I lost the ability to perform and teach dance, I recommended to my students that they should go study with my best friend and dance partner, Dakini. She also inherited all my slots at the two restaurants where I danced every weekend, and multiple nights for private parties during the week.

In case you missed it, as quoted from my most recent post over on Tinkerings:

She didn’t want to give those things up…

…So the Colorado belly dance community abounded with the condemnation that I wasn’t a “real” belly dancer, that I had gone off my rocker, had become a malicious, abusive jerk, and was “faking my injuries.” Apparently she knew this with 100% certainty because she’d “seen my medical records.” She did work in the office of one of my physicians, after all.

When I visited Minnesota, I had recently done a couple trial performances to test the waters—an abysmal and painful reality check that I was not remotely ready to start performing again.

But the potential recovery already apparent in me was visible enough to set off all her alarms and put her knife in my back.

One of the biggest kicks in the teeth came when she cancelled the benefit show that was supposed to help me weather the delay in my lost wages, as well as help me pay for medical expenses the insurance company had denied.

Much to our concern, Dakini had to have a medical procedure done shortly after my car wreck. Apparently she suggested that the money earned from this benefit show should be split between her and me. The dancers were shocked and appalled at this. They offered to put together another benefit specifically for her, but that wasn’t good enough.

So she squashed my benefit. The others were students. They didn’t know how to put one together, and she was one of the primary gatekeepers to performance opportunities on the Front Range, so nobody dared stand up to her if they wanted to be able to keep dancing.

Thus my benefit show never happened.

What did happen? I did stand up to her, at a time when I was incapable of even sitting up straight in a chair. As such…

I got blacklisted from the restaurants where I had once performed every weekend. I got dropped by my students and our mutual acquaintances. She also sabotaged things with my insurance adjustor and my cognitive therapist, damaging my connection to those relationships—one of them irrevocably.

I could have sued her for all that.

Alas. I didn’t have it in me to take her to court for slander and breach of medical confidence, because…

👆👆 REASONS 👇👇

SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY

There’s one final piece that I carried with me on that plane to Minnesota from my life circumstances in Colorado. It was a piece I had no idea could be contributing to my Perfect Storm because I didn’t remember it.

Remember how my damaged brain kept swiping memories when I went to sleep each night, then hid them down in the Dungeon where I couldn’t access them without some form of external stimulus?

Like shocking the BLEEP out of myself by reading my journals.

But I hadn’t done that yet. That wouldn’t happen for another year.

So no shit, there I was in Minnesota, sleeping next to the man who said, “I love you,” with his lips, but who said very different things to me with other parts of his body.

To make matters worse, this was my childhood bed. In my childhood bedroom. In the house I grew up in. In That Fucking Town. And I was about to learn that a predator had come to town.

No, not any of my childhood demons that I was about to face for the first time in ten years since I’d graduated from high school and hit the door sprinting. I’m talking about the most diabolical, violent, and damage-wreaking predator in my history.

If you’ve been around here for a little bit, you’ve already met him:

So there it is.

The first half of what created this Perfect Storm.

For the rest of the list, we’ll have to go back in time. Let’s set the mood, shall we? G’head. Spin the dial on the time machine. How’s 1984 sound?

Sounds pretty damned good to me. Let’s jam.

UP NEXT: THE PERFECT STORM - PART 2

© 2025 Hartebeast

**Let it be known that I have never had a back-stabbing best friend or dance partner named Dakini, so that makes this a work of fiction.

Based on episodes of my life that are not.

---

The Table of Contents to all these brain games:

1. Trauma Therapies I’ve done:

• EMDR - Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

• IFS - Internal Family Systems

• CBT - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

The kinds of art therapy and meditation work I do

2. My jaw-slamming sleep seizures

3. BLAM: My dance with a drunk driver

4. Not all traumatic incidents heap on a new layer of PTSD. It really depends on how it landed for me, what kinds of supports I had in its aftermath, and the impact it had on my life later. That time I was tossed by a tornado is an example of something that could have given me night terrors and PTSD triggers for the rest of my life, or at least decades. It didn’t. Instead, it is a terrifying near-death experience that stands out in my memory as a power moment, and a bonding moment.

5. One of the best books I have ever read in my life: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind & Body in the Healing of Trauma

Don't want to read the book? Here's the basic premise of what trauma does to the body and why talking about it, even in therapy, so often doesn't solve the problems: Short Version. Or Long Version by the author himself

6. That’s a loaded term. The brain’s capacity to heal is miraculous. Its ability to re-route, jerry-rig, and hack systems is even more so. Still. “Permanent” TBI means a lifelong battle of getting really creative and getting really comfy with the word NO, not a concussion that eventually “got all better” no matter “how good I look, sound, dance, or whupp arse.”

7. BLAM: From Super-Computer to Filing Cabinets - The impact of TBI on a gifted mind

8. Footage from a few weeks earlier at my big Thank You Party - the third time I carefully danced in public after the car wreck.

9. Holiday Hell: after being rammed by a drunk driver, the ER sends me home, saying I’m “just fine.” Spoiler: I’m not. Then the world shut down for the holidays. Joy to the world!