Publisher's Synopsis
Gentlemen, Line Up Your Cars, Start Your Engines, Green Flag, Gun Your Engines, Go Go Go! Genesis of the epilepsy, the beginning of the Electric Highway and the ups and downs of epilepsy, depression, and paranoid schizophrenia: Noble Jameson, my first neurologist, said "I've seen this many times before. When adolescence ends, your seizures will stop." My seizures will stop when adolescence ends; that was seven or eight years; seven years seemed a lifetime, eight years seemed an eternity. So began the mounting frustration and exasperation. That statement has echoed in my mind during a 40-year prolonged adolescence. The brain is like a car's engine-it controls what we do and where we go and some of us have faulty electrical systems. In adolescence, testosterone shifted my brain into overdrive and flicked the seizure switch that controlled the firing of my spark plugs to the off position-it has remained there for over four decades. At the end of my sixth-grade-year during the hot summer of 1974 my engine overheated and I had two tonic-clonic-known at the time as grand mal-seizures. At the time I experienced ictal (seizure) amnesia. So began a 42-year-journey on Epilepsy's Electric Highway. The fictitiously named Noble Jameson died in 2007 of liver cancer. Memories of events prior to that time became vague and uncertain-except for certain notable exceptions. In third grade, my crush on Wendy-a redheaded, emerald-eyed girl-and in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, Sarah-a sapphire-blue-eyed blonde, with perfect teeth who filled my thoughts and dreams.
