Things I Lost - and Found - in a Fire

From my book, Nothing Worth Doing Is Easy...

I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back on it, that period of time in which my over-draining shunt went untreated was also my first experience with seizures. When what I wrote off as simple memory lapses would hit, I was often found to appear as though I was staring off into space, completely distracted and detached from the world around me. Sometimes, those instances would even happen in the middle of a sentence and when it was over, I simply finished what I was saying as if nothing happened.

I now realize, years later, that I was having what’s known as absence seizures. That has now become a symptom that’s almost common for me to experience when I have issues with my shunt.

By the time I was able to find a new doctor who was willing to listen to me, acknowledge that I was actually having the problem I knew I was having all along and do what it took to fix it, I had already lost my job and was forced to stop living independently. I was, of course, happy to finally have a resolution to an issue that had been plaguing me for so long, but in terms of my living situation, the damage had already been done.

My employer at the time was more than willing to work with me as much as possible, but by the time I had been out of commission for two months with no end in sight, the organization had no other choice but to terminate me and fill my position with someone who was able to do the job. Of course, I understood the move and agreed that it was the only logical thing to do, but it still wasn’t an easy pill to swallow.

Once I was out of a job and back living with my parents without any prospects for recovery on the immediate horizon, I knew there wasn’t much point in keeping the apartment I was still paying rent on, but hadn’t set foot inside in months, so I made the decision to get the ball rolling on getting my things moved out and getting out of the lease. That decision came before I ultimately made the decision that I could no longer drive, so I went into my former town of residence one afternoon to start getting things cleaned out with plans to finish the move and turn in my key the following day, only to find a mess all over the apartment.

I knew at the time that there was a rash of incidents spreading around town in which squatters were invading seemingly abandoned property and it didn’t take me long to figure out that I had become a victim of those squatters. Once I figured out that nothing of mine was missing, I started the process of cleaning and moving a few things out before heading back to my parents’ house for the night.

About half an hour or so after I got home, the phone rang, with a city fire department number showing up on my caller ID. As it turned out, between the time that I left the apartment and when I made it back home, the squatters had apparently returned and set fire to my apartment. In that fire, I lost nearly all of my clothes, a television, a video game console and many of my other possessions. To add insult to injury, the fire was obviously arson and despite the fact that I was clearly not even capable to having been involved since I was approximately an hour’s drive away when the fire started, I was pursued for months as the only suspect before it was finally acknowledged that I had nothing to do with setting the fire.

No other suspects were ever identified and to this day, I still don’t know what really happened.

Eventually, I was able to move on from that and even got my old job back in the summer of 2012 when my replacement decided to move on. I was hopeful, at that point, that everything would finally get back to normal and life would go on, but it wasn’t long before I was facing another shunt surgery in early 2013, at the age of 25. That one, however, went much more smoothly than the last and I was able to return to work within a couple of weeks after symptom onset, thanks to the new doctor I had finally found who was very well-versed in treating all sorts of shunt problems.

Very shortly after I recovered from that surgery, I finally let my sister talk me into attending a new church, the first one I’d been to in roughly five or six years. That decision to give in and go to church with her turned out to be one of the best I’ve ever made, especially with regard to my spiritual health.