Water Condoms

I bet you're wondering why I'm talking about water condoms? Well I've been trying to find a way of explaining an expolisive head which I've had a few of recently. I'm sure many of you understand what I'm talking about, but for others out there who don't see the daily struggle that epileptics go through, for who it is an invisible illness, I'm hoping it will make them understand a little better.

For those of you that have read my previous blogs, you will know that I call my partial seizures ices and I that I say that tingles feel like thousands of tarantulas running up and down my right leg and arm. There's also the crabs, which depending on which way the conversation is going can be a bit of a dodgy one and maybe I should change it to crabs claws instead to explain the way the crunching my stomach, which makes me feel that something dreadful is going to happen, yet another type of aura which often leads to tingles. As I'm wrting this, none of it sounds the least bit funny, but when I'm talking about it, I laugh about, try and make light of it because as I found over the last decade, it helps to add a bit of humour when you're trying to explain about epilepsy. If you get people laughing about it rather than facing them with blind facts, they don't feel so scared and in turn, you don't get the shakes, the sweaty palms and the nervous stomach or the stutters.

The idea to explain the explosive brain syndrome came to me when I was watching an episode of 'One Tree Hill' a couple of weeks ago. In the episode one of the characters was throwing filled water balloons off the roof of her flat to get rid of the frustration and anger. And then I remembered a time when I was at school that condoms filled with water were a great source of amusement in the park on a Saturday afternoon, so I just changed things around a little bit.

And so to explain. Explosive brains last up to two days and feel as if a water condon has been inserted into my brain. The pressure around my head is immense, I feel incredibly tense and I desperately want the condom to burst, so that I can cry and relieve the strain that is tightening up my forehead like screws. Lines appear as each one is secured into position, my eyebrows start moving further together until they are almost glued together. This is what I see when I look in the mirror, along with bags under my eyes that have turned into black punching balls.

I'm very sharp when I speak to people. The other week my sister said I sounded very 'businesslike' on the phone and I had to expain why. At the time I didn't know what to do with myself. I was fidgety, spending most of the day picking my nails and walking round the house
utterly disturbed, and wishing that I had a pin that I could stick in my brain to burst the condom so that the torrent of water would come gushing out. But it wasn't it until the next day that the dam broke and I was able to sit down and cry. Then I just let myself cry as and when I need to because I know the pressure is relieving. It's always such a relief.

I hate suffering like this, but I read a good qoute on twitter recently:

'Never regret. If it's good it's wonderful. If it's bad it's experience.'