It never occurred to me I should be worried. As I drove south for the appointment at Wellington Hospital, my mind was on the open road and what I had chosen to listen to, a favourite by Sea Power called From the Sea to the Land Beyond, a melancholic soundtrack for a film I’ve never seen.
As the music ebbed and flowed, there seemed little more to be concerned about on this brisk and windy blue-sky day than the usual white-knuckled slalom of the Remutaka Hill road and then the overwhelming traffic in the mystery that is central Wellington.
I didn’t think, even for a moment, that I might be going to Wellington to find out something about myself that perhaps I didn’t want to know, that I might be heading towards bad news. What was wrong with me that I wasn’t thinking about what was wrong with me?
My GP had somehow wangled this interview at the hospital’s neurology clinic after I had mentioned to him a couple of months back that very occasionally, perhaps once a year, I would have what used to be called “a turn”.
While sitting or perhaps walking in a paddock, I would suddenly be overwhelmed by the most peculiar sense of déjà vu. Strange, dreamy images would appear in my mind, and I would need to lie down in the grass or on the couch for a minute or two and it would pass.
One turn would be followed, perhaps an hour later, by another, and by the end of the day – they last only for a day – I’d have had a few more, and that was that. To add to the puzzle, I’d have an inexplicable lift in mood the next day, or sometimes a sense of brooding. It was all very odd.
The first time it happened, now more than six years ago, we panicked. Was it my heart? Was it a stroke? Michele called an ambulance and I was whisked off for a night in Wairarapa Hospital. I had a few more episodes there, but neither the hospital nor my now-former GP could tell me what was going on. It was weird. It was weird, too, thinking back, that no further tests were thought to be needed.
My new GP, an excellent fellow with a halfback’s build and a young man’s enthusiasm, thought it might be a good idea to do a bit more digging.
He arranged for some tests on my heart that found nothing to worry about. And then, a week or two later, a letter arrived asking me to present myself at 1pm on a Tuesday at the neurology unit at Wellington Hospital.
‘Would you please walk down the hall for me,” the first doctor said. He had just spent 40 minutes asking me all sorts of questions about my turns – how often did they occur, what did it feel like, how many times had it happened and so on – before causing various bits of me to jerk using his reflex hammer. Now I was padding barefooted down the grubby floor of the corridor.
“I’m going to talk to my boss,” he said once I was back in the interview room. I put my socks and shoes back on, and sat alone while I waited and wondered about the walking business. Could it be Parkinson’s disease?
The boss, a friendly consulting neurologist who introduced himself as David, came in and sat down at the desk with a pen and paper and the solution to the mystery.
He drew a simple picture of my head and brain seen from above and added a swirly bit and wrote “temporal lobe” and explained about electrical storms on the brain’s surface. Eventually, he said the word “epilepsy”.
“There are two types: focal and generalised,” he explained. “You have focal temporal lobe epilepsy. The déjà vu is a classic sign.”
In the blur that followed I asked lots of questions and was given lots of answers, along with a prescription for a medicine with an unpronounceable name.
On the drive back home, the last such journey I can make for six months, I tried to keep my mind on the road and the plaintive soundscapes of From the Sea to the Land Beyond. I tried not to worry.
