EPILEPTIUM: Epilepsy and Adamantium

Speaking about Heroism to my younger readers, adults as well.

Epilepsy is a real thing,

Seizures are a real thing,

Adamantium is not a real thing, but it is something that we can refer to.

Adamantium is the regenerating metal that was put into Wolverine’s/Logan’s body by Sargent Stryker, who was his tenth experiment on mutants. Wolverine was worked on behind Professor Xavier’s back, creator of the X-Men in a school for gifted students, which were all mutants.

We have a neurological disorder and apparently so do mutants when referring to the movie LOGAN, Xavier’s seizures are so powerful that not only will he destroy himself, but the rest of the world too.

(NOTE: LOGAN is not for children or older parents)

We are not ready to be a mutant nor do we want to be, so we find ways of how to fight and win our own battles.

And the ones that do, the ones that can pop up and wipe their shoulders off after a fall from doing nothing but following orders, like Wolverine’s heroism, is something that the person in need of a hero may want to follow.

Just don’t expect to have 6 metal claws come out of your knuckles. As Logan says in X-Men played by Hugh Jackman when asked by a young Rogue, played by Anna Paquin, that releasing his claws “hurts every time”, just like Epileptium.

Epileptiums usually don’t remember the damage that they did or did not do. So, we wait until later in front of mirrors to see what had happened or what we are told by others with the marks, scars, black and blues that are pointed out to us.

Epileptiums just throw the pain aside and wait for the healing process to begin.

Think about the years and years of life’s struggles from Epilepsy and the way that we recover from seizures; sometimes without even knowing that there was a problem at all.

So, we think of Adamantium and compare it to how strong our bones, skulls and bodies are and we wonder that just maybe

Epileptium does exist!

SOMETHINGS ARE MEANT FOR A REASON, EVEN IF YOU DON’T THINK SO!

Somethings indeed are meant for a reason and should truly be thought about or over or something bad may come of it. Again nobody knows when, why, where or what, but if you are smart you will learn that somethings may need to be thought over deeply when we find ourselves down on the ground, smashed face first with which could have been the end of our days alive!

For me this all occurred on October 29th when my wife was desperately wanting to leave at 9p.m. to a pumpkin festival in Old Westbury Gardens, LI, to see The Rise of The Jack O’Lanterns. Lets cut back three weeks to October 8th, the night my brothers Michael, his wife Despina and Anthony were supposed to meet us out at the park together as a group when situations started to occur. Apparently Despina was feeling sick, Michael wasn't feeling up to it, and Michelle and Anthony were the only ones wanting to go anyway. I refused myself on going that weekend as well, or at all, but she didn't give in to her temptation to go. But then and there just before we left I asked for a protein shake to make myself, something I always ask Michelle to make for me, but on that day, at that very moment before drinking it, I plastered myself from head to toe, and it was like pouring glue on myself. My arms, hands, and jeans where locked shut, and I was confused. Although my confusion turned bad when I heard the yelling. My wife stayed in the kitchen, my parents and brothers were called over to find out what the problem was, and found me soaked and quite angry, I removed my clothes in our bedroom and found myself hysterically crying in my corner bedroom leather chair. Everyone went home that day trying to figure me out; not an easy thing to do to for an epileptic. 

And this is the Point of the story, if I had given it a better thought this may not have happened, and if I was the size of my two younger brothers, Michael or Anthony, I for sure would have been killed off many times already. My other brother Chris as well, even though we are very close in size and shape, he would not be able to control these problems the way I do, for sure. But on Saturday, October 29th, was my first fall face down - I hit my chin, jaw, nose, forehead and knees. There were families - Good Samaritans - all around making sure that I was safe, yet bleeding from my almost broken chin and jaw, battered teeth  and nose. Before I was helped up I was worried about if any children or parents had been hurt by me. No one was, but Michelle had a slight cut on her left  knee from trying to grab me from behind.

I was was helped up with one of the guards walking on my right leg and limping on my left back to get attended to by a medical technician who said himself that “All these lights here and flashing phones and cameras for pictures is a seizure waiting to happen”. Michelle and I had told him that we had been here for three years now, but this time all the lights were way brighter then in the past. 

My chin was swollen, my inner bottom lip as well, my teeth, my jawline, my right arm and left knee hurting so bad that I couldn't tell for the life of me what was possibly  A. Broken  B. Smashed in (teeth) C. A bit off tongue and lip and D. A broken leg.

All things that are possible after a seizure like this happens and I remember being asked if we wanted to go back out there. Michelle and I yelled out, “Are you Crazy”!! Well Michelle did the talking, I did the look of, ‘Can we get the hell out of here now’, rolling my eyes of remorse to her. I was rolled out of the park to our car in a wheelchair with a medic holding an oxygen tank and a mask strapped over my face to breath through.  

 I was able to get into our car, with help by the medic, and there was only one thing going off in my mind, which was, ‘Why didn't I listen to the one who was trying to keep me home that day, why was I so foolish in making such wrong decisions, when the one that was trying to keep me safe that day was God’! This was not my idea, but I agreed to for my wife, even though I was tired already, would it of been such terrible idea to say no. NO, but she already spent money from a few weeks prior, I didn’t want her to waste money again, but is money ever a waste? It was nothing other then wasting a life away on a $30 pumpkin field trip!

All in all, when starting a new medication on top of the five already that I’m on, there is no stupider idea of doing something out of the ordinary when you know that horrible things may, and will happen by not trusting yourself in understanding that for epileptics and others of conditions, fighting away death is an everyday, every hour, every minute to second war!

You mustn't let the problem you suffer from beat you, especially when it has anything to do with your brain, which no doctor will ever understand the meaning of, besides God! 

And you can trust me mostly when I tell you that the Lord is on my side, and yours, because death could have come to me in so many different ways already, but I am here today, and will be tomorrow, with ways to keep you safe and away from trouble with stupid ideas of foolish for nothing activities. And if you are wondering still if I am in one piece, face included, I can tell you absolutely Yes, but I will never do something like that ever again, so be smart about your future decisions in life because Somethings Do Happen For A Reason, Even If You Don't Think So! 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
and
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

In early 2015, before even starting my website, Michelle and I had stopped at our favorite store, Barnes&Noble. I enjoy having my collection of their leather bound books, and almost all of them are to this day, but something struck me that day a little different. I grabbed, as you see in the above image, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, and I remember quite well that Michelle said to me, with an awkward look on her face “You want to read that!?” Umm, “yes” I go to her, “what can it hurt, it’s here, and it’s famous, is it not?” ‘well yes okay, if you want it’. I brought it up to the counter and even the lady there had looked quite awkward as well. After purchasing it I said to myself “What is it with this book that makes people so afraid of it?, what’s the big deal?, is it because the book is quite long, longer than most. I had no idea of who Fyodor Dostoevsky was, nor when or where it was written and why.

I hadn’t read it for a short while because I was getting bored out of my mind from Dickens, Twain and others and superbly annoyed by Alexandre Dumas’s books, manly and mostly his Count Of Monte Cristo. Thanks to those irritating boring as all hell authors, I grabbed off of my shelf a paperback of Crime And Punishment, Michelle looks at me and goes, “you going to read that!, wow, okay, if you want”. And that day changed the way I read and wrote my own information, I was able to write and type better myself from his teachings, simply by picking up a book!  

When I introduced myself to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, it was of sheer amazement to me and most of how superb he was. His talent, his writings, and his superb knowledge was back in Russia in the mid 1800’s and would have been the same today. I did not know of his background yet or of his problems either, which were epilepsy, but as I read along from the very first word, mind you, to his very last, I felt something in his writing that of which only another epileptic could pick-up on. Nevertheless, he was epileptic from birth which came as no surprise to me, but even so, aside from the books of the Bible, he is the greatest genius of our time. As you read along all his life-long masterpieces, you can feel the troubles he went through, the problems in our own epileptic lives: causing trouble but not knowing the reason, trying to do good for others when things start to fall apart on you, and, as any epileptic who has or the ones who watch, run away from their incidents, hopefully before things get worse as the way he wrote about Rodion Romanovitch Roskolnikov, a confused college student who is diseased, though he doesn't know of what, nor does anyone else, and causes trouble that punishes his life, but he thinks that he is doing things for the better, trying to help others. Always wakes up felling better, like most epileptics do, and yet, more confused. The book has many twists and turns in trying to find out who the bad people really are, and poor Roskolnikov, which he is a well wearing rags for clothes, sometimes remembers what he did, but nobody will listen or believe his story. Mainly because of his illness, his friends try to help him all the more. Very interesting and exciting book, keeps the pages turning from start to finish with the epilogue being the most crazy part of the whole book. Dostoevsky’s mind blows your own away!

Background
Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on November 11th, 1821 and spent most of his life in St Petersburg. Placed his children, who died at birth, as some of his main characters; his daughter Sonya and his son Alexey, along with all of his Novels, as he puts it, Petersburg. Death of his mother in 1837 and the assumed murder of his father by serfs, just two years later. In 1864, the death of wife and brother Mikhail and along with his severe financial difficulties, but concurred them with the continuation of his masterpieces. In 1880, he completes The Brothers Karamazov, was given a speech at Pushkin celebrations in Moscow, and died of a lung hemorrhage on February 9th  the very next year at 59yrs of age caused by emphysema and epileptic seizures. He is buried at Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St. Petersburg.

 In 1849 he was arrested and sentenced to death for participating in the ‘Petrashevsky circle’ where he was reprieved at the last moment, but sentenced to penal servitude, and until 1854 he lived in a convict prison in Siberia. In the decade following his return from exile he wrote his stories and novels that drew heavy on his experiences in prison, which goes to show you how his writings as in The House Of The Dead, Notes From Underground, Crime And Punishment and Demons, a.k.a The Possessed, are more true than not. Although not fact, but fiction, reflects back on his own life more fact than fiction!

So when you think of how sad your life is or of others, just imagine how others lives were, and still are today, in poverty, out on the streets in the freezing winters and boiling summers.

You wouldn’t believe it, even as I am telling you now, but others, I guess some other geniuses you may of heard of or recall learning about, though more difficult to fathom like Albert Einstein who declared “that he had learnt more from Dostoevsky than any other thinker.”   

His novels are all astonishing, how he can grab you, lock you into his stories and never let go. Fyodor Dostoevsy’s books are more like traps, per say, because they are all so well written and translated that you can never open another book, nor put his down. In his last masterpiece Dostoevsky revealed the components of his own split personality, depicted in four main characters; a humble monk Alyosha, a compulsive gambler Dmitri, a rebellious intellectual Ivan, and their cynical father Fyodor Karamazov. He writes as if he even has a double split personality, a triple even with all other characters of his, younger, older, men and woman; if that even exists. But I do believe that it did in this epileptic.

Everything else after will just sound, to make it short, Stupid! His books in the past were translated mostly at first, by Constance Garnett, but most recently and better by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, a married couple who live today in France. It is written on the back cover, one, from the San Francisco Chronicle as “This fresh, new translation…provides a more exact, idiomatic, and contemporary rendition of the novel that brings Fyodor Dostoevsky’s tale achingly alive…it succeeds beautifully.” And another from the Chicago Tribune which states “Reaches as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as is possible in English…The original’s force and frightening immediacy is captured…The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard English version.” Along with others.

In The Brothers Karamazov, the Washington Post Book World states that “Dostoevsky is at once the most literary and compulsively readable of novelists we continue to regard as great…THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV stands as the culmination of his art - his last, longest, richest, and most capacious book. This scrupulous rendition can only be welcomed. It returns to a work we thought we knew, subtly altered and so made new again.” As well as the The Times(London) “A miracle…Every page of the new KARAMAZOV is a permanent standard, and an inspiration”. With many more!    

My own wife has asked me many times if I would choose to read this or that, and since then, the past year, I have given the same answer, “Did Fyodor write it? If not, then no”. She said to me many times, my mother even, that if you love this author as much as you do, his books, then write a blog about him. Tell someone who may be as interested as you obviously are, and share with them his knowledge. I was not afraid of doing so, I’m just not sure that anyone will care to learn or just to enjoy his novels as I do, but someone else in my case or such other being home bound, will need to learn of his excellence and expertise as I have to myself. His books are mostly much longer than others, but teenagers and young adults wouldn’t mind reading a sentence without falling asleep! Every adult in my family turned away from me laughing even when I would hold up a book because they ask me why I want to read something so long, I can only guess that since there twice my own age, so then don't, nobody is asking or telling you to. But when you have so much more time on your hands then you know what to do with, it doesn't hurt to try.

And it’s as simple as that. Most of the time I’m reading a daily Missal or I have one of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s books in my hand. Every word on every page keeps you excited and into his storytelling, dramatic or funny, or both usually, you will never read a page from any other author with more words on it without stopping, comma by comma. When the sentences stop or the book ends you wish for two things: That he wouldn't have stopped and Second, how much he could have done with his life if he had the chance to fight off the epilepsy and of lived longer. In The Brothers Karamazov, there's an entry, towards the end, that he has a story for his next project, but knowing that he hadn't survived, will make you teary eyed, just as I am writing it to you today. It's sad to say even though, but if he wasn't epileptic himself and had lived his life the way it had come, that many others as well do believe that the genius of his world would not have been on paper the way it was. Therefore, the name Dostoevsky would not exist the way that it does today.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV have now become my favorite books ever written from my favorite author to have ever lived. I now own 6 CRIME AND PUNISHMENTS, 2 others digital, and 4 BROTHERS KARAMAZOV’s, along with every one of his other writings I was able to get my hands on. From his very first when he was 22yrs old, POOR FOLK, where he writes a letter to his brother Mikhail, a long letter in the introduction, that “I am seriously pleased with my novel, to make it short, if my project does not succeed, I may hang myself.” Amazing and surprising to himself, thank God, that he was smarter than even he thought at the time. The people that Mikhail told him to see and speak to knew that there was something special about Fyodor from page one. He brought his manuscript with him wherever he went, and from that year in 1846, published, was a great success and from that we have our genius. From then on, he was able to publish 14 novels and short stories in total before his death, and for which I myself own almost all of them. Some older illustrated ones from the 1960’s, leather bound with 22Karat gold paper edges. Like the one in the picture above from the Easton Press Collectors Editions. There is one thing though that I must note to you about his book called Demons or The Possessed: it is not a book about demons, it’s a book about people with seizures who suffer during their lives the way most of us do, the way he did! His very first entry is from Gospel according to Luke:

Now a large herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; and they begged him to let them enter these. So he gave them leave. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.

When the herdsman saw what had happened, they fled, and told it in the city and in the country. The people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. And those who had seen it told them how he who had been possessed with demons was healed.

Luke 8:32-36

In Russian literature from his time, and maybe today, since I am not Russian or in Russia, he was a religious man too, a Christian in Moscow, so he never says anything bad about God or Christ, but there's something he says that makes it quite funny. It may be said today in Russia, but have never heard it here in America or anywhere else for that matter, but it's somethings that he has that is very catchy! Somethings that basically means that a person may say to another, or themselves, which could be about something or someone else. And I use it myself here even nowadays with my wife Who laughs at it, wondering where it came from, because she doesn't read Dostoevsky either, works a lot, but still  uses it herself in our text messages sometimes, which is:

“Pah….Spit on it!” and or “Devil take it!”

The names of the characters in all his novels, in the Authors Notes, he describes to make the storyline easier for the reader, are the people that he didn't appreciate, as evil neighbors or teachers from his past. The names in Russian are not too hard for a reader to understand and translate to in European or English, besides the one and only I was having trouble with, his own. Fyodor, Fyodor, Fyodor? This troubled me for quite a while, my family as well when I asked them if they had ever heard of the name before. And none of my friends are Russian, which would have helped, until I finally gave in to grab my cell and find the translation. Fyodor is actually a beautiful name, I said to myself and my mother who was with me at the time “Oh, what a nice name, a lot nicer then Bruno”. Something I say more then ten times a day! I couldn't find myself to drop the first two letters of his name, nor could anyone else. Mom I go again “we have had many famous Fyodor’s here in America” she goes “Roosevelt”, ‘Yes him, also quite special.’ And then I texted my wife on her way home what the name Fyodor was in translation. Again she had no clue, probably sick of me asking her as well, so I gave her a pretty simple, yet funny hint, “one that sang with his two older brothers,” but stopped there for a few seconds because who would she know, and said that “one was Alvin”. A millisecond after returned with              

THEODORE!!