I had an “event” on December 15. Simplistically speaking, I spent about five or six hours throwing things, shouting swear words, and generally being obnoxious. Out of this was born about three (3) weeks in the hospital and two (2) diagnoses.
The current best diagnosis: Hypomania (Cleveland Clinic). The earlier and now mostly rejected diagnosis: Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE). TLE means seizures; hypomania does not include seizures as a symptom.
Certifiable
In some sense I suppose being certifiable sounds okay. Trust me, it is not. My issues are minor, I am incredibly lucky that this is so. But the process of your brain stripping a few gears while jumping between shifts without the benefit of a clutch can be particularly harrowing for your family. My wife, Irene, has carried an immense load dealing with this whole process the past few weeks.
The impact on others around me is the biggest impact I’ve observed about my brain change. Inside, however, I’ve been basically mentally reborn. Kind of like an OS change: maybe an unplanned upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11. The UI Is all screwed up, you can’t find things, and for some reason some kind of AI feature keeps popping up everywhere. Something, most likely a lot of things, is / are definitely wrong.
“Long John” Baldry has a song that expresses a lot of my feelings about the whole situation. And it also often makes me laugh, which is much needed.
Keeping it short
There are a lot of questions that this all raises. Why has TLE been rejected now? What tests have been done? Why suddenly develop a problem like this now? Can the illness be detected? Or can a potential upcoming incident be predicted and avoided?
I’m intentionally not going to answer all those questions in this post. I’m aiming to try a new thing with my blog in 2026: I’m going “bite sized” in terms of content. 500 words or thereabouts, no more. Maybe future posts will answer some of these other questions. Time will tell! But I definitely expect to be writing more about my new mental state. It is just too weird to ignore.
Sounds rough. All the best to you and the family. Stay optomistic, even if it’s cheesy.
Thanks, Alex! It sounds a lot worse probably than it really is.
The brain is a massively complex bit of organic and chemical precision. It is all running voodoo code of the highest magnitude. Figuring out where the problem lies when something goes is more wrong akin to “magic” than medicine. But I really do recognize a lot of the typical debugging steps I used to use with software and hardware back in the day,
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Stuff me with green apples, that is quite a journey you’ve been on. And no doubt, far from a welcome one. Firstly, I wish you a speedy recovery. Secondly, I look forward to your insights, as you clearly have thought to share on such a seismic shift in “life”.
It has been an interesting process, Roger. I probably shouldn’t share, but it feels ‘right’ to do so.
I’m retired, so a diagnosis of this kind doesn’t really hurt me very much. And I theorize that there are other folks out there getting diagnosed with mania of some kind, possibly facing incomplete or in-progress diagnostics… all the stuff that can make the process scary.
And it bears mentioning that my wife has stage 4 cancer- that is a serious and truly life-changing diagnosis. What I’m going through is definitely a thing: very real, and it is kind of scary when your brain goes off on a voyage without permission. But I get to ‘recover’ to some degree, which is truly a gift to be given.
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