By Laura Claridge
My son was eight years old when he was struck and thrown by a car while riding his bike. Of course, this was a traumatic event, but he seemed to bounce back quickly. My little boy soon looked and acted his same self. He was running, laughing, studying just as he had been before he was hurt. I adored him — Trevor was and is handsome and exceptionally bright. Today, he is a wonderful man in his forties, but he will likely never be the brilliant fully functioning person he would have been had he not suffered an “insult to the brain.” That flash second of impact has taken a lifetime toll.
All seemed well until he turned twelve and began to suffer frightening seizures. I had to remind myself that at the time of his injury, his doctor had cautioned us: “Trevor might start seizing when he reaches puberty, a common recurrence,” but his father and I managed to forget the warning entirely. A team of medical professionals examined Trevor. That group proved inept. “No EEG necessary,” they said confidently. “The boy’s playing you.”
The doctor had located scar tissue on Trevor’s brain by performing a simple-scalp EEG. To my horror, I hadn’t realized that Trevor had been seizing since the bike collision. “I think it never stopped,” he recently told me. “I usually had at least one episode a day, but I preferred not to think about it. Don’t forget I was a kid, and I assumed the doctors knew everything.”
I remember Trevor’s neurologist in Spartanburg warning us at the time of his accident that Trevor’s adolescence could restart the irregular brain activity. Another of Trevor’s physicians at Johns Hopkins Hospital became central to Trevor’s life. It turned out that Trevor had a mix of seizure types lasting for days or weeks with only a few days of reprieve in between. He would now be heavily medicated, some years more than others, and he hated how it made him feel.
In 1991, Trevor had inpatient monitoring that showed his seizures were worsening. His pattern had progressed from simple partial, often manifest as sad feelings, to complex partial, the symptoms now including slobbering, chewing, head drooping, and garbled syntax, the ambit of his suffering. A doctor rescheduled a future surgery for four months after a neurosurgeon had performed seemingly non-stop tests.
The neurosurgeon excised part of Trevor’s skull and stored it in what was basically a freezer for later reinstallation. My son recently told me he was worried that it would get lost, and I admitted I had too. Increasingly irritated, he stayed in the ICU for three days with no seizures to monitor.
After another long week, Trevor suffered two generalized tonic clonic seizures. The neurosurgeon then removed the depth and other electrodes and one of Trevor’s two almond-size amygdala, the emotional regulator of the brain, and then pieced his skull together. We are all grateful to have many of his most severe symptoms relieved and profoundly glad to have my son alive, but I know now never to underestimate “an insult to the brain.”
Laura Claridge has written books ranging from feminist theory to biography and popular culture. A frequent writer and reviewer for the national press, she has had her works appear in newspapers and magazines such as The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. Laura and her husband live in the Hudson Valley in New York state.