I was sitting at my computer when we got the call. My father in his chair, my mother on the sofa. Two days earlier we had found out that my father’s aunt was in the hospital in Rio with the coronavirus. She was my grandmother’s twin sister. My biological grandmother died in the early 1970s, two decades before I was …
Epilepsy is a chronic illness and disability characterized by recurrent, unpredictable seizures. Epileptic seizures are transient events during which people lose control over all or parts of body-mind function. This can result in the rhythmic twisting of a person’s wrist, sudden inexplicable feelings of joy, or involuntary spasms of the whole body. Since antiquity, epilepsy has occupied healers, philosophers, physicians, …
Warm haze
As I spoke, people looked at me worriedly. The kindness in their eyes was mixed with curiosity and concern. Rather than answering me, they turned to each other to discuss something beyond my grasp. I had aphasia and my incoherent stream of words was puzzling to the people around me. I spoke, I thought, in perfect sentences but …