Twisting Testes To Stop A Seizure

It was real. She did it. I remember it as clear as day.

The Situation

I was intubated. Naked except for a sheet draped across my midsection.

There was a lot of machinery around me and a bright light above me, somewhat blinding.

My wife was there. Always there, loyal and beautiful. And, much to her frustration, I was trying to talk to her again… with a tube going down my throat.

The convulsions started suddenly and I began to seize up.

Somehow, even with the intubation in my throat, I vomited, unable to hold it back at all. I felt it go across my chest, my abdomen, my arms.

My wife hit the call button and, almost instantly, my nurse came charging into the room. But, to my surprise, she seemed angry.

Snatching the sheet from me, exposing me completely, she grabbed a handful of my testicles, pulled, and twisted… hard! (Do NOT try this… keep reading)

Unable to move, my terror complete, the seizure stopped and I heard the nurse say “Damnit. Now we have to clean all this up.” and she left the room.

How Does This Make One Feel?

First of all, I thought I was going to drown in my vomit. Intubation would have prevented that but what did I know?

Second, I remember laying there cold… ashamed… naked.

I had caused my nurse a bunch of stress and work and, in return, she had stopped my seizure by yanking and twisting my balls.

Is that a fair trade?

She roughly cleaned me up, covered me again, and left the room.

Fast Forward A Week

With intubation finally removed and my throat recovering from a month of respirator, I gently began talking.

Most of my nurses wanted to talk to me. After all, I’d been silent and in their care for a month now and they were all just waiting for me to die.

And then one night, I’m talking with a nurse who brought a podium into the room to talk to me. Odd right?

And, as my sweet Felicia puts it “He was just talking like regular old Adam and then suddenly he says… ‘You know how if a kid is having a seizure you can yank on their balls to make them stop?“

My nurse just stared at me a second and said “… nooo. I’ve never heard that one.”

To which I replied “Oh yeah. My nurse did it to me just the other night when I had a seizure.”

Wife and nurse met eyes across the room, confusion obvious.

The Less Painful Truth

“No one did that to you, Adam. And you never threw up or had a seizure.”

But of course I had. I remembered it so well. So plainly. Just like any other memory in my head. It happened.

Then, as I begin describing the situation further, I mentioned that when the hospital docked at the pier to take on new patients, they would sometimes take me to a cabin for care.

My mind was slipping again. Entire situations were appearing that never happened.

And, to my wife’s horror, I was telling everyone about them because they were just crazy experiences.

Felicia left the room, calmly but upset, and took a minute in the hallway to try to get a hold of her emotions.

Another nurse approached and she explained, asking him “Is this permanent? He was so normal and then, all of a sudden, he was gone again, talking about things that never happened.”

He explained to her that a month on Fentanyl would take some time to recover from and that, hopefully, one day my mind would recover from the damages.

An Acceptable Ending

My mind did recover… sort of. It took more than a year for the hallucinations to stop happening and to stop paralyzing me.

But, even after 7 years, I still remember each and every one of them just as real as any memory I’ve ever had.

In the real world, those things never happened. But in my reality, they did.

The emotional damage, the fears, the pains and humiliation are still there for me to remember and they’ve haunted me off and on ever since.

It is a curse I live with and, every now and then, I have to explain to my wife why I’m suddenly emotional or down as I relive or recall one of those awful experiences.

But… to this day… I am so thankful I brought up this particular hallucination. So thankful that I was corrected.

So thankful that I never saw a kid having a seizure and responded by… well… you get the idea.

If you want to hear more of these demented things that happened to me, there’s a whole book FULL of them. Years of these nightmares haunting me that other patients go through too.