So we slept nearly six hours last night, following on a good 4 hours, uninterupted, on Sunday night. My seizures, which have been arriving at hourly intervals starting around midnight for about a week now, are becoming less frequent, and more mild during sleep hours. I think the recent flurry of email, voice mail and phone consultation with Dr. Shih at UCSF – tweaking this drug dose, trying that management strategy, etc. – have started to pay off. We’re still having more than 15 seizures a day as I write, but many are so mild I can just continue on with whatever I’m doing -I’ve had two while writing this post. This is a really good thing.

The way I’ve come to understand this, a tumor is like a big, crazy roman candle of life: it’s a bunch of cells that are wildly dividing, growing like a weed, but with no particular plan or respect for that which lies adjacent. It’s like the 4th of July roman candle you light, but that tips over and zigs wildly around on the ground, hitting things and ricocheting all over. It’s a crazy thing and it generates signals that look to the brain like wild static: it’s like a wierd pirate station with a midnight signal that makes no sense, except maybe to some wild-eyed looneys and a few disaffected teenagers with odd, nocturnal habits.

Occasionally, the tumor’s noise get past the defenses of the well-ordered neuronal networks that do the brain’s main work. My glioma sits quite close to the region of my brain that controls my left side, and the glioma’s nature is to kind of intertwine with existing cells, according to Dr. Larsen at UCSF. Seizures are, as far as anyone can figure out, completely random. I’ve started a spreadsheet to chart seizure against time of day, drug regimen etc., but little in the way of obvious correlations appear in my crude data.

My seizures, blessedly, take the form of a focal point or partial motor seizure, which is a complete walk in the park compared with the gran mal seizures that afflict others, notably those with certain epilepsies. I’ve had at least one email exchange describing life with gran mal: turns out there are small, and large, graces, no matter what you’re going through, at least in my case.

But getting back to blogging: the blog post below is way to long. I’ve got to get back to my newspaper and ‘pro’ blogger roots and shape this thing up. The long posts, which I really love to do and which are a hugely therapeutic way of getting out the stuff, good and bad, that I’m experiencing now, should be moved over to ’stories.’ The blog posts should include brief, well-crafted teases that make people who are so inclined, want to read the long stuff. Too many dense text posts is a sure way to knock down a blog’s readership (and RSS subscriber base). Back to basics… and I still need to get to writing about a couple of corporations, Choicepoint being one of them, and what I’ve learned from having to deal with them…

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