The Absurdity of Being Human - an introduction

Hello, my name is Simon, and I am, at time of writing a 40 year old Graphic Designer living in the south of England with my amazing wife and 2 children. I've got many interests, but my main passion in life is the rather niche hobby of painting and modifying Japanese scale model mecha models, i'll write more about this in another post, but what I do want to do is post about my story so far and why I have decided to create this blog. 

I'm not new to blogging, through the years I have written blog posts about my hobby, about psychology, opinions and politics, but for this blog I have only one intention, to write about my experiences and just how much my life been completely turned upside-down in the last year. It is my hope that my experiences can at the least, help other people going through what I have been through, and what I am experiencing now, as it's been beyond a doubt the hardest time I have been through, and I am thankful to be alive.

Let's start with just a little bit of history, I don't want to make this single post a complete autobiography so I'll try my best to just summarise without detail what's happened, since August 2019.

In August 2019, I was diagnosed with, after what was assumed to be a just a very bad sinus infection, a very serious case of encephalitis. Up until this point, life was sailing along nicely. I was a little overweight with the classic dad bod, but I have been totally alcohol free since the early 2000's, and gave up smoking with the brith of my first child in 2009. I was prone to the odd cold and throat infection, and have had lingering asthma on and off since I was 11. The encephalitis caused me to have a stroke, thankfully while I was in hospital, and recovery was expected to be long and difficult, and resulted in me also having an emergency craniotomy on the whole right top hemisphere of my skull. I was in hospital for just over 2 months in special care while they monitored my recovery, where I had speech and occupational therapy to check to see how badly the stroke had damaged my brain. 

Skip forward now to March 2020, where I had my Cranioplasty operation to replace the giant hole in my skull. The operation went perfectly. Although at this time, the covid-19 pandemic was just getting into it's stride here in the UK, I managed to avoid the great panic our National Health Service had to partake in to ramp up capacity. Everything from this point it seemed, although a bit crazy in the world, was returning to normal for me. I was getting exercise every day, my wife bought me a beautiful chihuahua puppy who I named Sayla for my 40th birthday in January, and I had started to fully return to my work. 

Skip forward again to late June 2020. After a particularly stressful morning working from home, I suddenly experienced a sensation of pins and needles in my left arm. This was just something silly, like leaning on my funny bone, but it sent me into a full-on panic attack. Fearing I was having another stroke, I called out to my wife, and then, at the top of my stairs, had a seizure. I woke up some time later gasping for air, surrounded by paramedics. I was then in my local hospital emergency department for 3 hours waiting to find out what happened. I was referred to a neurologist with suspected Epilepsy. 

I was diagnosed with Epilepsy a month later. I knew this could be a possible long term side effect of encephalitis but I never expected it would happen to me, and it scared me, a lot. So much so, it paralysed my ability to lead a normal life. Over time, I developed depression and anxiety about having a seizure. 

Skip forward to the start of October 2020, I had another seizure. It was again, completely unexpected, and after too, I had taken a month of work, and seen a specialist therapist for 5 weeks to help manage my anxiety and depression. It scared me so much, I spent 2 weeks unable to leave my bed, and even longer to even leave my room. How could I, after 3 months of no problems, and medication for Epilepsy, have another seizure? 

Since then, I have returned to work, but it's still on ongoing, daily battle with myself, my depression and my anxiety, but the war is being won. This blog will hopefully be a note of these daily battles, and I hope someone out there will find it useful too.