Miles To Go Before I Sleep (26 page)

“What's your name?” a paramedic asked.

“I don't know,” I said.

“What were you doing when this happened?”

“I don't know,” I repeated.

Everything that happened to me before the seizure was a blank. I didn't remember my name. I couldn't see very well.

The medics injected me with Valium, a tranquilizer, and more antiseizure medication, and I went under….

Having a seizure was an awfully scary thing. My whole body went into violent convulsions for about twenty minutes. In the grips of a seizure, I was totally unaware of what was happening to me or where I was. I could easily injure or bruise myself. I came out of them alive, but I lost some memory for a while and my head felt fuzzy. For days afterwards, I experienced a lot of mental confusion. My vision also got even worse for three or four days after a seizure.

Emotionally, I felt powerless and out of control. A seizure could strike at any time, with little warning. I could be eating in a restaurant, shopping at a mall, driving down a freeway, anywhere, when I'd suddenly see a rainbowlike aura signaling the onset of a grand mal seizure, equal in intensity to the electric jolts that psychiatric patients get in electroshock therapy.

When the rainbow light appeared, I had about three minutes to find a restroom, tell someone what to do, clear everything out of the way, and get down on the floor. As the rainbow light moved from the left side of my visual field to the middle, my body grew cold and prickly and I started to shake. Then everything went blank.

As the Valium wore off after a seizure, I felt overwhelmed by feelings of emptiness and helplessness. I felt terribly isolated and alone. I wouldn't talk to Scott about my feelings and didn't have any friends nearby.

The Dilantin slowed my ability to learn and recover from the hijacking. Mental confusion and dizziness are other common side effects of the drug. Emotionally, I also felt awful. I woke up every morning feeling anxious, irritable, tired, and depressed as if I were in a dark cave. I woke up to a world of fear and hate and anger. And I couldn't see any way out of it.

I often called Barbara to tell her how sad and miserable I was—or just to cry. Hearing her voice was a small comfort when the world around me seemed so cold and dead.

I was terrified by the prospect of having more seizures. I found myself constantly checking the left corner of my visual field, expecting to see the rainbow light at any time.

I WASN'T GOING TO LET SOMETHING as small as a seizure get me down. Not long after my first seizure, I started getting restless again. I was eager to get back into the world.

On Sunday mornings, I flipped through the “Help Wanted” section of the newspaper, looking for teaching positions. I applied for some, but didn't get any offers. The job market for teachers continued to be tight. Then, through a personal connection, I heard about an interesting opening.

My friend Suki Fitzgerald called one day to see how I was doing. Suki had just started working as an independent consultant for IBM. Her job sounded interesting; she flew all over the United States showing regular education teachers how to adapt IBM's existing education software so it could be used to teach LD kids.

IBM wanted to hire another independent consultant with special education teaching experience to learn their software and travel around the country showing teachers how to use it. The person hired would be responsible for covering a nine-state region.

I hadn't been out in the world much since the hijacking four months earlier, but I knew IBM computers. I'd used them often as a teacher. I would have to take only a few more classes to get more comfortable with them and learn some new software.
I could do that!
I thought. It didn't sound that hard.

Suki gave me the name of a contact person in Minnesota, and I decided to apply for the job. I didn't feel safe driving in downtown Minneapolis, where IBM had its offices, so Scott dropped me off for my first interview.

IBM's office was in a large, modern glass and steel tower in the heart of the Minneapolis business district. I walked in the building and saw busy men and women hurrying in and out. I was excited to be in the fast-paced, hustle and bustle world again!

I took an elevator up to the fifth floor, entered the IBM office, and gave my name to the receptionist. After a few minutes, a middle-aged man in a dark business suit came up and introduced himself. We walked back into his office and chatted a while.

“Are you sure you're ready to do this?” the interviewer asked me.

“Sure,” I responded. “I'm ready to go back to work.”

After I filled out some forms, the interviewer said I'd need to come back for another interview. I scheduled it for a week later.

The morning of my second interview, I put on a nice dress and heels and had Scott drop me off at a bus stop to catch a bus into downtown Minneapolis. I waited and waited, and the buses kept coming. But my bus was nowhere in sight.

Finally, I asked one of the bus drivers if I was standing in the right place. It turned out that I was on the wrong side of the freeway—going in the wrong direction!

I walked across the freeway. Bus number 23 finally came, but I let it go. I didn't see it correctly. To me, it looked like bus number 3.

I waited about an hour and finally another bus came. I asked the driver if I was in the right place, and he told me I was, but that bus 23 had just come and gone. He could take me downtown but not to the street I needed to be on.

The driver dropped me off in downtown Minneapolis. But since this was the first time I'd ever been downtown on my own, I was soon lost. I stopped to ask several people to help me find the street I was looking for. I didn't plan or think ahead at all. I didn't bring the phone number of the interviewer, so I couldn't call and explain my delay. I finally found the building and arrived at my interview two hours late.

The interviewer agreed to see me anyway, and we talked about the position. He thought I'd be a good fit, because of my special insight into the problems of LD children and teachers. I could speak intelligently about the main issues in special education—and I knew about LD.

He asked if I'd be willing to have another interview, and I said yes. For my third interview, I met with a very sweet woman. Again, I was asked if I thought I could do the job. I said yes.

The next day, she called and offered me the job. She knew I didn't have a strong computer background, but she was confident that I could learn about that. I thought I could too.

At that time, I hadn't been in any type of learning environment since the hijacking. I just assumed that I could learn the way I used to.

I was excited to go back to work. I was thrilled about working for a company with such an excellent reputation—and getting to travel again! The pay was good too: two hundred dollars per day. Yet I didn't know how my new learning disability would affect my job performance.

I spent the next couple of weeks in the field with Paula Lang, the woman who I was replacing. I wasn't required to do anything yet, because I hadn't gone through the formal training. My job was to watch and learn. I flew to meet her in different cities: New York, Boston, Atlanta. Paula always met me at the airport.

She showed me what schools she was working with and how she presented the existing IBM software to teachers. On one trip, I got to visit the Bronx. The kids and teachers were all assembled there. It was really fun.

I went down to Atlanta with another woman who worked for IBM out of Portland, Oregon. We met Paula in Atlanta, and the three of us rented a car and drove to a kidney dialysis camp about an hour outside of the city.

The summer camp was exclusively for kids with kidney problems. They had computers everywhere! The IBM consultants showed the kids how to use the computers. IBM was doing a study to see how the use of computers affected kids who were going through kidney dialysis treatment. Normally, kids going through treatment were sick a lot—they suffered from dizziness, vomiting, nausea, and so on. But IBM and the treatment staff were finding that kids who used computers were so happy that they weren't getting sick as much.

The kids were involved in a lot of other activities at the camp too: they were swimming and boating, and rehearsing a play to put on for their parents at the end of the week. The parents also watched their kids work on the computers.

I was very interested in what was going on, but the job was also very taxing. I tried to be easy on myself. But so much information was coming in that I felt as though I was constantly on overload.
Why was it so hard? Why wasn't this coming to me more easily?

“Just take what you can take,” I kept repeating to myself. I kept reminding myself that I was testing my limits. But how could I know how much I could do unless I really tried?

I tried not to let my co-workers and clients know how much I was struggling. I was afraid if they knew about the depth of my problem they might not want me.

I often got lost walking around the camp. One time I was walking from the barracks where I was staying to the warehouse that housed the computers. There were trees everywhere, and I was always paying close attention to them to make sure I didn't hit one.

I noticed a group of five or six young boys sitting in the grass alongside the path. They were whistling and they said something to me. I looked over to them, lost my concentration, and—Bam!—I smacked straight into a tree.

The boys started laughing. “Didn't you see the tree? Boy, are you stupid!” one of the boys shouted.

I looked over and said, “I was just shot in the head about four months ago and I lost a lot of my vision—
so I didn't see the tree.”

I was embarrassed and mad.

“Oh, we're sorry, we're sorry,” they apologized.

My head really hurt from walking into the tree, and I had a bunch of scratches. But the blow to my self-esteem hurt even more.

Traveling from city to city gave me a better idea of what my job was going to be like. Yet I still wasn't sure I could do it. It was hard for me to remember from day to day what I'd done just the day before. It was hard for me to make sense out of what was happening.