Not Present

In my childhood, from six to thirteen years, I took three medicines to control my epilepsy. I recall from an adult conversation with my physician that one of the medicines was phenobarbital, prescribed for global seizures. I do not recall with certainty what the other medicines were. I believe one was dilantin, prescribed for partial seizures and to control muscular reactions. This information is further made imprecise, because I do not know the details of my history with them. I do not know what trials the physician made in dosages or schedules. I do not know whether my physician gave me an annual medicine holiday. I have almost no memories of taking these medicines, though I took them daily. I can recall, when I attended camp for five summers, my cabin leaders telling to take my pills. I have about as much memory of taking medicine in this extended medical crisis as I do of breathing and urinating. From my adult perspective now, looking back on those childhood years, I was not present in my own life for a long time.

Reading the pharmaceutical literature on the medicines today reveals how difficult their administration must have been for my physician and my mother. (I say my mother, because in my traditional family household, my father - in those years a lumberjack and lumber dealer - left to my mother the chore of raising me and my sister.) Phenobarbital, a barbituate, dulls the mind, producing the effect of chronic intoxication. At the same time, it can induce excitability or irritability in the child. Do these side effects explain my confused memory of my mother's exasperation at my childhood behavior? Was I more than a normally rambunctious boy?

Probably the medicines explain my amnesia about elementary and middle school. I recall next to nothing about my teachers from kindergarten to the eighth grade. I remember that I sat in classrooms, at desks with inkwells, sometimes near my cousin. I remember rooms with blackboards. I remember learning to read, write, and do arithmetic in a fog unilluminated by insight. I recall that my mind did not seem to respond to school assignments. I recall that my body did not seem to have coordination or ability at recess play activities. I recall nothing about my classmates, other than my cousins and a friend with whom I walked to and from school. I recall being a crossing guard, wearing a white belt and sash with a badge. How would anyone have trusted this medically indigent child to protect other children? Does my responsibility as a crossing guard mean that, because of the medicine, my teachers and school administrators perceived me as reliable?

Epilepsy is the absence disorder, because it is a disease that you have that does not happen to you. It is also an absence disorder, because of the side effects of the medicines. They induce long periods of fuzzy and sporadic memories, when continuity of personality is lost. They so incapacitate the mind that the person is, in a profound philosophical sense, not all there. Boy, interrupted?

Revised August 12, 2007.