It was a cloudless day in the Bay Area but it would end with shattering both of my shoulders due to a violent tonic-clonic seizure.

If we back up to earlier in the day 6 years ago, it was filled with several of our normal Sunday routines. We had taken a 6 mile walk along Blackie’s Pasture - a beautiful pathway right along the San Francisco Bay that starts where we lived and ended 6 miles later in downtown Tiburon.

Later in the evening, at 6:00p PT, Laura was prepping my mid-morning meals for the week which consisted of a chicken breast, broccoli, and brown rice. It was at that moment that that my arms came up by my side, I looked at Laura, and tried to yell out to her yet couldn’t speak.

I felt as though I was drowning. Each next word I tried to say made it harder to breath. I was paralyzed but could see with my periphery vision and hear her as she dropped everything in came running to my side while screaming for help. It felt like minutes to me but I’m sure it was much shorter than that.

My next memory is sitting in the back of an ambulance was with a paramedic speaking loudly to me. I looked outside to see several people standing there as well as fire engines and police cars.

I looked for Laura and asked her what happened. They had me sitting up on a 45 degree angle so that I could see that she was sitting in the left corner of the ambulance looking back at me. She was shaking and barely able to speak because she was sobbing so hard. The paramedic told me that I had had a seizure.

As I came out of the seizure, as is standard, I was asked a series of questions such as “Who is the current President of the United States?” to test my cognitive ability. As I initially started to fully come to, I knew the answers to those questions yet couldn’t speak yet. But, after a few minutes I was able to fully answer their questions.

I would come to find out that when my seizure started Laura screamed so loudly that three of our neighbors, including a cardio ICU nurse, came rushing upstairs while she called 911.

While we were in the ambulance I told the paramedic that I could barely lift my hands off of my knees. He told me that it was completely normal because the seizure is like an electrical storm in the brain. I sensed that it was more than that though I took his word for it.

Once at the hospital, as Laura would fill in a few of the blanks of the story for me later, I had been transferred to a normal room with several other patients. I was speaking normally and it seemed as though I was out of the woods until I had another violent seizure. That was when the room filled with a full medical team who rushed me into a private room.

Laura told me that it was then that the medical staff began pushing heavy medication, including a variety of pain meds. While they wheeled me away for several tests, I would later find out that Laura collapsed along a wall in tears.

Someone, either a doctor or nurse, who was stitching up a patient in a room saw her and helped to coach her though that yet they couldn’t stop stitching their patient up (of course).

After conducting an MRI they found that I had a brain tumor sitting near the motor skills strip and in front of the speech pathways. That’s when she called her parents because she didn’t know what else to do and needed someone close to us to talk to. Due to the time difference, it was the middle of the night for them.

Without her realizing, her mom took the first one-way flight out the next morning. Her dad told her that when she called to give them an update and she couldn’t get through to her mom’s cell.

Due to the force of the seizure they thought that I had dislocated both of my shoulders. It would be a few days before they realized that I had actually shattered both shoulders, including the humorous and rotator cuffs. Additionally, I would need donor bone, anchors, fiber wire, and two screws (in my left upper bicep) to completely rebuild them.

Unbeknownst to us, this would be a life-long journey filled with 4 months of physical therapy, brain surgery, chemotherapy, several more seizures, ongoing MRIs, yearly blood work, daily anti-seizure medications, and being diagnosed with Epilepsy.

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