Funny how memories and my ability to describe them if given enough time has a way of composing itself into something rich and new and meaningful. Some things slipped right through into composition, and other sticks and rocks are stuck in the sifter and cast aside for later years to granulate and rot. It is similar to how my father’s compost pile gets filtered down at the limen between our property and the woodland green. The mind is nourished if not traumatized by the heat of experience; it is in those decaying decomposition of fleeting moments that I find my salt as a writer. Those little sprouts springing up I refer to them as recollections of soul.
May 1st, 2022— Jonathan had sent me a text that evening prior to please not have another seizure. He had enough little fires going on with a lot of people calling out sick, and he didn’t need any more on his plate. I offered to set up church service with him. He told me he’d pick me up at 7:45 the next morning and drive us over.
Question: Why didn’t I just meet him over at church instead? Why is he still picking me up? God bless him! I mean, according to my last blog post, I had just gotten my driver’s license back, right?
Let me reset the stage for a moment, unstack the chairs, and prepare for this church assembly like Solomon did a couple thousand years ago where all of his striving after the wind, circled back around under the sun. I turned on the lights. Camera. Action. Are we recording now? *Sigh* I recall…
December 29th, 2021— While celebration resumed on finally getting my driver’s license back with two friends of mine Steve and Sue over at Two Stones Restaurant on the corner of Naamans & Foulk, I had another seizure while finishing my burger and chips. I remember Steve calling 911. I also heard the sound of a woman voice beside me. Who was she? Her voice was blurry and rest of the details fuzzy, but I was stuck in my own mantra of prayer. I said and repeated to myself, “Lord God Control! Lord God Control!” I convulsed until the quiet dwelt within.
The ambulance shipped me off yet again to Crozer Medical Hospital. I gowned up. And I was strapped into an EKG machine. And I had to observe the bright and chaotic lights and shadows of Neuro ER room overnight while they too observed me. Their staff never ended up putting in a regular room. There I stayed right outside of the ER front desk; the hospital had a triage of sorts; they were hemorrhaging due to their own staffing issues, something to do with threats of a strike according to the local newspapers.
A doctor, who was performing one of his routine rounds, informed me that he was a mandated reporter to the state, and the state would suspend my driver’s license for another next six months. Again. This nameless face also tentatively upped my anti-seizure medication from 500 milligrams of Depakote ER (extended release) to 750 a day. Later my neurologist made this protocol permanent. The following morning, I had rung the bell again and again for a 9 AM dose. I didn’t receive my dose until 10:45 AM. I feared that I might lose control with another seizure if I had to wait any longer I would get another one any moment.
Hospitals are supposed to be a place to rest, but my stay there were all but restful. The number one indicator to the onset of a seizure is sleep deprivation. I remained wide awake the whole night. The department was littered with the audio wallpaper of alarm fatigue. I heard the annoyance of a heart monitor beeping and hyper-aware of the compression at regular intervals of a blood pressure cuff. I remember sleeping most of the next day. I had to cut off all the electrode pads from my chest hair once the shower didn’t do the trick. A minor inconvenience. That was nothing by comparison to my ten day stay before and after brain surgery plus an additional 21 days after that for rehabilitation. Nothing!
A word to the wise and to anyone else going forward: wait at least three minute before calling an ambulance if I do go into a seizure. I was told this by my neurologist from a follow up appointment with him. He had me sent to get an EEG or an electroencephalogram done the month prior on November 23. The clinician put me through every rigmarole test of flashing lights to trigger the onset of a seizure. (By the way, sudden sounds are more likely to induce a spasm than any flashing light could.) And after a reading from my electroencephalograph, staff concluded my current anti-seizure meds worked well-enough that day that they signed off my permission form to get my license back from the DMV. A few weeks later, I got my notice; I could drive again. How short lasting that was! Only three places I drove: to and from the Christmas Eve church service, dropping Jonathan off to the airport to see his family Christmas day, and lunch on December 29th.
And for the several months leading up to that rubber stamp approval, my father and I had been practicing driving monotonous circles around in an empty school parking lot like I did with him as a teenager. I had to relearn my childhood-to-adulthood skill-sets. However, this the process was much shorter, thirty-one years compressed into a matter of months. Yet I found the relearning process to be a much more frustrating and debilitating than I anticipated. I didn’t like back then the word ‘frustrating’. Frustrating was a phrase tossed at me to describe my current situation from a sympathetic audience, but I took it from my perspective as a form of casting stones, one rock over top of another pressing down until I couldn’t bear the weight. I took offense to the negative cogitation I thought of it. I associated ‘frustrating’ with Pavlovian behavioral psychology, the emotive reflexes of mind without its reasons. The dog salivates for treats without knowing why, and I refused to be coaxed into gentle comfort like cattle before the slaughter. Instead, the word I used at the time was experiencing a cogitative simplex. The subsequent months after brain surgery I felt too removed from myself, too dumbed down, too drugged up or any combination of the three to even have anything remote to a psychological complex. Cognitive simplex I figured would have to do as a term in the meantime.
My father told me that he was more concerned with my reaction time more so than anything else. See, the left side of my body had been paralyzed due to the complications of two seizures during the operation. The technical term is called hemiplegia and it’s similar to someone who had just have had a stroke, thus that’s why I spent an extra month in rehab and an another couple months with at-home therapy visited several times a week by three staff members over at Mercy Health: a physical therapist; an occupational therapist; and a cognitive therapist. But that’s for another story.
***
Who I want to be and who I am are two different beings. Who I am want to be is someone fiercely independent. Clearly I’m not. And who I am is someone entrapped by his own convalescence. Similar to more ancient and biblical times, my primal mind associated sin with the physical ailment. Lepers were not only unclean, but they had a spiritual uncleanliness to them as well.
My more ancient self asked, what ritual cleansing do I need to be clean?
What I do I need to do? What is my purpose? In other words, what does God need from me?
So first off, let’s be clear here: God doesn’t need anything from us. He’s God, and I am not Him. The divide between Creator and creation is defined by scripture. I mulled over this fact after a sermon Pastor Will Stern did on March 20th concerning 1 Timothy 6:13-16. (See video link here.)
I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, to keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will display at the proper time—he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.
In his sermon, a distinction is made between communicable and incommunicable attributes of God. Communicable attributes are those that can be communicated to his creatures. God is love; we are loving. God is faithful; we are faithful. Although we are not always that way, God is. The incommunicable acts are those that cannot be communicated to God that is unique to God alone. If a creature would possess these attributes, they would be gods themselves: all powerful, atemporal (exist beyond the confines of time), and the source of all life. His three incommunicable attributes include His independence, His sovereignty, and His incomprehensibility.
Pastor Will then look out into the congregation and asked them a rhetorical statement. Are these concepts such as God incommunicable attributes relevant to our day-to-day life? Or is this some sort of lofty abstract ivory-tower image of God when people like Chris Battin who shared earlier in the service how people are struggling with their drug addiction on the streets of Kennington Avenue?
I looked over to Chris. He visited us that week to share his ministry outreach. The man reminded me of a Mr. Rogers figure. He wore a button-down cardigan vest and orthopedic-styled shoes. Hard to imagine him walking the streets of inner-city Philadelphia handing out bananas and water to addicts and prostitutes. I remember thinking yes! His view of God does appear awfully lofty you might say. And to ask such a formulatic turn-of-phrase would mean he would later cut it down like any straw man argument. I scuffed at the remark.
Remember I have some control issues I’m working through. My tendency to lean much more into the thrust and gusto of diatribes and turning over the moneychangers tables of Mark than to conduct what I saw as pointless theological nitpicking showcased for instance in the Gospel of John. At least here I could make myself useful to something in the greater body of Christ. Here are my hands. And here are my feet. Or that was my thinking.
Yet again I might be too harsh a critic toward high-minded theology because I myself have the tendency of using the everyman and the downtrodden as a human shield against God to deflect his glory and distract him away from my own flaws.
Skeptical, I kept listening.
According to Pastor Will, the apostle Paul is rooting his command for Timothy (and as an extension all of us) in why he should persevere and fight the good fight. We should be doing in light of who God is. It’s not irrelevant, but it strikes at the heart of human pride. As well, God is independent, and not some abstract conception. He is love. The pastor continued and explained that in western society, we like to think we are independent but we’re not. Think of the food in your refrigerator. Someone had to grow the food, transport the food, stock the shelves, and money to buy the food. We are all profoundly dependent on each other.
Yes, true enough. It’s one thing to say we are dependent on one another in society (even the most self-reliant of folk), but what does that have to do with God?
Louis Berkhof writes about our dependency not only on each other but on God as well. In his book Systematic Theology he notes, “As the self-existent-god, the one who exists as the Great I AM, he is not only independent of himself, but also causes everything to depend on him.”
Pastor Will continued. He said that our belly button is also a testimony to our dependency. This pride shattering sign of dependency is the basis of our worship. As well if there anything that might stick with us is that Jesus too had a belly button. He was born of the virgin Mary. He was fully man, fully God. He was dependent like us, and independent like His Heavenly Father. He serves both as the bridge and gap fulfilled to our salvation.
I most certainly am not God, not independent, and not sovereign. That’s for sure, but I still struggle with that obvious truth. I think I’m starting to relearn my psychological complex again!
***
So let me rearrange the yearning of this question. What do I need from God? What’s my small but inadequate contribution to His purpose? Not my own, His?
In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, the narrator John Ames writes when nearing his death due to a heart condition, “To be useful was the best thing the old men can hope for themselves, and to be aimless was their greatest fear.” My much younger self (who has been recently contemplating his own mortality well beyond his years) struggles with this question more on a hands-on level rather than a hypothetical theological garble of someday. See! There’s a spasticity when flicking the water away after washing my hands (it shakes). Or there’s a general weakness I feel when lifting my coffee cup to my lips. The thought lingers: if I can’t do these simple things, how can I attempt to do anything greater than beyond these trivial tasks. I grow tired of these repetitive mediocre exercises. Prayer doesn’t feel like enough to quench my thirst, (I want to do more and be useful) but prayer is something I hold onto with my shaky left hand to sip on. That and reading.
The only novel I’ve cried while reading was Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. In that epistolary novel, Charley Gordan is a mentally-challenged man of 68 IQ who had been selected as the prime candidate for a new experimental operation. Scientists have found similar positive results with improving the IQ of lab mice including its lead subject, a mouse named Algernon. Charley goes and gets the operation done, and over the next few months his IQ more than triples surpassing even those of his scientists. However, midway through the novel, Algernon is acting not like himself. He bites Charles out of impulsiveness, and come to find out, Charley’s intelligence too is only ephemeral and soon will be fleeting. In the upcoming months, he would regress like his mouse and begin to be haunted by his former self. He publishes a paper in a scientific journal titling his findings The Algernon-Gordan Effect. He records that in several months he would return back to his mentally-handicapped-self as before. As I read the later half of the novel, I slowly watched page-after-page his spelling and grammar slowly deteriorate. Never in my life have I been so moved by the decay of language. In his final journal entry before he was to put away into a group home facility up in New York because he couldn’t handle the pity of others, he asked to his unrequited love interest, Miss Alice Kinnian, his former teacher at the Beekman College Center for Retarded Adults, to please put flowers on the grave for Algernon. I cried at the ending.
I summarized that novel to help you better understand how much of a chip on my shoulder when it came to my own intellect. I’ve been prideful on that mark. I cried not only for Charley but also for in part myself if I was in his situation. I thought of myself as smart, and I had this ambition and drive to make a name for myself as a writer. (And may I add I still do.) I joked and ragged with Jonathan some two years ago as he was stuck just nodding for parts of the conversation because he didn’t have any comical comebacks, I blurted out to him, “It’s okay to be boring. Get used to it!” I was so caught up in all of my hubris wit and ego, I didn’t hear the hypocrisy in my own voice until I began to compare my former chats with him to the ones in the months following post-operation. I found myself speechless and quite boring indeed. I was scared to even talk to Jonathan let alone other people in my attempt to be perceived by others that I was still smart, not slow to speech. I spent a lot of my time after church appearing helpful by putting away chairs with my strong arm and weak arm to assist the best I could rather than congregating with others in the back. This was my vain attempt to not make myself the fool.
November 3, 2021—that evening, we met for our weekly Bible study. To close at the end of all our studies, we go around the room to pray, to give thanks, and lift up to God on behalf of each other, our community, our nation, and world at large. Please note: I don’t like to make myself the center of attention (despite my ego). Besides my own baptism and the occasional thanks before a meal, I never felt before like I needed much of any prayer. That was better left to those whom were left on their death bed or some supernatural ¡Ave Maria! request; rather than some trivial matters on my part I could solve. But then came a matter I couldn’t!
It’s one thing to treat prayer as one does to an acute medicinal treatment, but this plea to God was becoming chronic. Week-after-week, day-after-day, and basically all of the time I’ve been inundated with prayer. The whole lifting up process had grown irksome to me and I impatient with it. Those what I thought to be conciliatory prayers over me were becoming a bit of a grind. I had complained to Jonathan enough so that he jokingly notified the group to please not pray on my behalf. And of course, like reverse psychology, what did everyone want to do as a result? I was told by Heather who hosted us that evening at her and her husband’s house I didn’t that much of a choice of the matter. It was a free country after all. God bless America!
That evening, after I finished my own rambling disorienting prayer on someone’s else behalf, Steve said to the group (after all the amens were done) that it reminded him of John Bunyan’s allegoric novel The Holy War. In one part of the story, that all the people desire to send a message to God. However, the people worried whether their words would come out alright. And the messenger called Holy Spirit said that he would rewrite and make it perfect.
When I heard, I felt conflicted if not mad at God. The thought: it was my prayer, not God’s prayer to reconfigure and revise. How dare He?
And there goes me with my control issues again.
***
I remember while in rehab over Taylor Hospital, a cognitive therapist named Chrissy walked into my room. My father had been in the room after his work that day to visit me. It was his or my mother’s but not both (let alone anyone else’s) turn to visit me. They still maintained their one-visit-a-day stipulation due to Covid restrictions. I never saw below Chrissy’s nose, but as I told another nurse she had the eyelashes of butterfly wings. My regular cognitive therapy guy Mike told me how impressed she was over my math skills. My mother also told me how much of a wiz I was at doing all these differential equations and of the sort over at Crozer. Someone had told her this, although I don’t remember doing so myself. I still maintained the story without questioning it. My future as a mathematician was my consolation prize for getting brain surgery. The term I used back then was getting brain-damaged. I was told by staff and my parents it was impolite to use that word and to please use a nicer one. I couldn’t think of one at the time.
The other myth about me I maintained and told others was that with all the steroids they’ve given me, through all my thrashing roid rage, I grew by another two inches taller. I was a solid 6 foot instead of my 5 foot 10 inch self. That bubble had also burst the day of August 9th when a doctor was also told in paraphrase: Well, you know that brain surgeon who got it all? Well, he didn’t get all of it. The results from your pathology report came back, and from biopsy of your anaplastic astrocystoma it shows it’s a grade 3 tumor, but good news! it’s of the IDH mutant gene which means this cancer won’t spread throughout the rest of your body, however you will need to go through a one-year regiment of chemotherapy and radiation to get the rest of it out, and of course I strongly advised you to take ________. Why aren’t you interested? I mean if you have any concern you can discuss them with me now. I crumbled up his business card with my strong fist instead. By the way for the record I am 5 foot 10 1/2 inches tall. A nurse told me after getting my height and weight. Yes, I count gaining the half inch like a toddler who has something prove of his maturity, although fisting his business card was clearly not a sign of it!
The neurosurgeon warned me of my tendency toward impulsiveness after surgery. I didn’t fully grasp what he meant post-operation. Was I likely to go out start up a gambling addiction or drive recklessly? No. Instead my conflict was more intimate. Before I would have had a more stoic face about me. If I didn’t, I wore my mask much better in social situations. Now I have a much harder time to control my emotional expressions. I may used often dollar words but I expressed with the body language of pennies. At face, I look fine; but in private, I’ve been mostly took it out on myself when no one else is looking. Perhaps I should ask God to stop punishing myself with punches, to stop hitting myself in the head. A few times my mother caught me the act. She sat me down and demanded to know why I did that. I said that I didn’t know. Had it been anyone else, she would have knocked them to the ground. I replied that I really didn’t know. I didn’t. Still don’t.
Maybe I’m angry with my brain tumor. Or the void and scar tissue it left behind. Or more so the fact I can’t control my lot in life behind my veil, my emotions. I feel exposed and open to ridicule. I can still see the two dents on my head above my temples. It was as if God tore the curtain in two top to bottom as some sort of prophecy I still can’t grasp its meaning. If I was the preacher from Ecclesiastes, I would have been angry at my own holy-of-holies, at wisdom itself. I’d imagine myself saying All of it is hevel, this breath that fogs my glasses; and after all of my pushing forward, I came around here again doing all of these repetitive monotonous exercises like prayer. All of it is a striving after the wind. Again. But that just my speculation. I don’t know where this spurred. My best guess is the sin of pride.
***
July 2021— I remember lined up on my window sill during rehab was an array of cards full of well wishes and prayers. And there also sat a vase of sunflowers wilting before my eyes. Jonathan handed it to me fresh from Roseanne on his first of several Saturday visits. Unable to get up myself without the alarms ringing off from my bed, he cut off the bottom stems and place the flower vase on the sill of Room 421 which overlooked Chester Pike and a Wawa gas station in the midst of construction. But those sunflowers man! Wow! They’re strange creatures. It is said that the flowers to maximize its light exposure always face the sun until it’s fully grown. Then they face due East. It was the heat of July, but inside the room it was cool and sterile. The sunflowers knew it and felt it. I thought naively they were following the sun (or at least the faulty fluorescent tubes above), but no, they were dying. However I knew it not. I thought I was going to live forever or at least a nice ripe old age of 108. That and I made a promise to God that I was going to have six children someday. Not five, not seven but six. Every nurse that came was a potential mate. Drugged up, I only asked two nurses to marry me. I felt both the sense of immortality and also the immediacy to live in the present because this life is short. I confided with Jonathan “See that woman. I’m going to marry her someday.” I waved. She smile, but only half my face smiled back. The other half mimicked but drooped some. Then Jonathan filled the vase from the sink faucet, and the flowers disoriented knew not which direction they go. So as the days passed, I marveled at their withering.
I reflected and regurgitate often the cherry-picked verse Isaiah 40:8, “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our Lord is forever.” Later I was reminded of this passage months later on May 1st, 2022 during an adult Sunday class. I open up my Bible and instead of reading that passage I read the two verses prior, Isaiah 40:6-7 where “all flesh is grass” and “surely we are the grass.” Grass we are indeed!
July 2022— Chrissy my other cognitive therapist sat next to me. It was the same day my father came to visit. I forget the date, except for that day a nurse tested me what date of the week it was; that was everyday; all other days were a blur. Chrissy handed me some math problems. They seemed simple enough. And I was a math-wiz after all. But after reading the words on the page, I thought this can’t be right, that this here was a trick question. What kind of high level calculus is this!? Then I looked down at the paper. The words were big. Too big. And on the side was labeled K-5 learning. Then I asked Chrissy how dumb was I? If given for instance a flesh-kincard reading scale (I couldn’t conjure up the word at the time…) so I recall saying if given on a point system, what did she think my grade level was at? First grade? Second? What about third? In other words, how stunted was I? I think the term I used back then was retarded. Again not polite.
I couldn’t quite get her expression through the face mask, but she fluttered those lids more than usual. My father in the corner of the room asked if it was okay to excuse himself. He said that it might be better for the two of us to discuss this matter in private. She said, no and to please sit back down. He was fine where he was. Her words came across sweet, its nectar perhaps too sweet to the taste of this numbers guy. She told me that I had a slight impairment to right frontal region of the brain which included more abstract thinking like language based math problems.
I didn’t have a math problem. I could add. I had a language problem. I was lost, cut from my roots, and clipped from the stem. I knew not my way out of a prepositional soup. I was drowning in my words. For many hours I gaze out at the sun, its rising and setting, and the harshness of the summer heat. As well, I ignored the best I could the fluorescent glow and rolling carts behind me
I remember this one woman, a nurse named Abby I was dead set on marrying, the same one I confided to Jonathan about. When Abby checked up on me, my spine straighten up and threw my shoulders back, but my left arm dangled as dead weight. I had enough sense at this point to not propose to her yet. I was beaming that as she told another nurse during a shift change that the patient in Room 421 has been doing really well as of late. That was the last time I saw her before being shipped home from rehab.
Abby, if you’re reading this, we should set up a date sometime and get know one another better like naming all our future children. I’m joking. Half joking. I have planned out our first three kiddos, and we can discuss the rest.
***
I have a chronic ailment of being prideful. Let me present the forward thrust: my intellect. The battle I used to play was a battle of smarts and sometimes other people got hurt. It was a sparring match of minds where I outmaneuvered my opponent. Now I struggle to control my tongue, speech, and thought. Out of a blindness of faith, I replaced my sharpness of wit for a blunt dullness of a crayon. Now humbled, I’m trying to learn how to have more faith. It’s really hard.
I can relate to the fictional character Charlie Gordon in one key transformational way. We both learned the hard way that wisdom has nothing to do with intelligence. I am reminded of this truth every Sunday at our current weekly sermon series on the book of Ecclesiastes. Each week, the message of futility is preached “under the sun”. Wisdom is something deeper than that. It is the dirt. From dust we came and to dust we return. We may be limited by our own emulation up to lofty heights in our own tower of Babel, but man knows no bounds by his ignorance! We are all Solomon. We are all the preacher at lost for his words, our words, my words and speechless before Almighty God.
God, I hope to never have another seizure again, but if I do I hope to have that image of repentance firmly planted in my head. To this, I pray to Christ Jesus. Amen.