Man, writing is triggering epilepsy now. This is just perfect. Not rolling around the carpet epilepsy, but the slow smoldering kind that if left unchecked begins send electro-chemical sparks in all directions, till eventually the brain looks like southern California on a Santa Ana weekend, brushfires everywhere. Even comments in Facebook are a problem if they go beyond just a couple words. And posts like this, sheesh. I think I have only blogged once in two weeks, maybe twice. Afraid to push my brain into a sizzling overload, memories and skills and personality shorting out. Been there. It can go on for months.

Really intense writing has always been a trigger, and I use to play around with my meds to keep the muse going–but suddenly this month it is any writing at all. And when I go without writing, I can feel the epilepsy fade to normal background levels. The problem is that once things become triggers, they rarely untrigger. You spend your epileptic life removing and avoiding the things that set you off. I always figured writing would go eventually, as the hole in my brain–the focus, in the parlance–is in the frontal lobe near where writing is handled. Writing, language, etc. Eventually the dinged neurons in the focal point would become over sensitized. Seizure activity spreads from there up into the temporal lobe where all the fun stuff is.

Yeah, I can feel the symptoms, symptoms like storm clouds on the horizon, just from writing this. I guess it’s time to hang up my writing shoes.