The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Remember this
With her memories gone, Blair Brown uses photographs to reconnect with her past.
“Blair, this is us leaving the reception in the convertible. Do you remember any of this? “No.” “You don’t remember the red convertible?” min’s bedroom downstairs so she wouldn’t have to use the stairs and risk a fall if she had a seizure on her way up or down.
Blair can’t even take a bath alone, so Jim stays close by. Opportunities to expand their business into South Carolina and Tennessee were passed up. A partner was brought in to pick up the slack while Jim attended to hospital visits or worked from home to watch over Blair.
Plastic bags full of medical bills clutter an upstairs room and occupy Jim’s mind. He sorts through two bound seizure journals filled cover to cover with meticulous notes, a daily record of the family’s strange new normal.
“My purpose is to try and make life as safe as possible,” he explains softly. through the desert with little more than their hiking boots and the packs on their backs. It’s a mystery to her how they sailed from coast to coast on a dhow or how they fell in love while climbing Mount Kenya and watching the sunrise unfurl from 17,000 feet.
The first words of her only child, Benjamin. For that matter, the entire list of her son’s firsts, from his earliest steps to his tiniest laughter. She took thousands of pictures those first three years of motherhood, before the stroke, and they serve as her only record of that time. Jim assures her that she was a good mother — still is.
Remember that memory is two parts. One fact, the other emotion. Even though Blair knows all these things happened, she struggles to evoke feelings related to the experiences she no longer remembers. Sometimes she doesn’t know where real memories begin and where she’s filled in the gaps with stories from others.
What she’s been told sounds true but feels like hearsay.
A ray of hope
To help reduce the frequency and severity of her seizures, Blair begins her mornings with a dose of Clonazepam, a drug with side effects that range from slurred speech and drooling to hallucinations. Her nights end with Vimpat, which can cause depression and dizziness.
“I’m like a zombie and just — I’m not there,” Blair said. “I feel like it’s better for me to have seizures than be on all this medication.”
But still she takes the drugs, and still she has dozens of micro-seizures a day. She calls them “twitches,” and they impair her mental acuity.
There is new hope for people who suffer from seizure disorders, although it is not without controversy.
Many believe that cannabis oil made from marijuana is an effective treatment for seizure disorders.
Rep. Allen Peake of Macon is sponsoring a bill to legalize cannabis oil this legislative session. Last October in Dallas, he hosted a screening of “Growing Hope,” a film promoting medicinal use of cannabis oil that focused on three Georgia families whose children suffered from seizures. The room was packed with legislators, advocates and families of seizure-stricken children. Afterward, Peake opened the floor to questions.
Blair rose unsteadily, shaking in the dark shadows cast by the velvet drapes of the Dallas Theater.
“How are you going to help people like me?” Blair asked, her voice cracking. “It’s easy to get this through for children, but it’s very hard to explain it for adults.”
Jim had driven them almost two hours to the meeting in part to meet others with seizure disorders. But there wasn’t anyone like Blair in the sea of children and harried caregivers.
Under the current version of the bill, the oil would only be allowed to contain a small percentage of THC, the psychoactive component of marijuana. That might be fine for children, but Blair worries the medication won’t be potent enough to help adults like her, who weigh more and require stronger doses.
A woman approached Blair after hearing her speak. She was the mother of a teenager who had just been diagnosed with epilepsy. Would Blair be willing to talk to her?
Of course, Blair said, and gave her Jim’s business card with their phone number. For the first time, she was beginning to tell her story. Jim thought it could be motivational. Blair wasn’t so sure, but she was willing to help.
“It has that stigma,” Blair said later, contemplating the potential treatment. “But if you can take the oil and be more productive, it’s a nobrainer.”