stangirl67

Since adding this to my list, I have found out that what I was having were not panic attacks at all but a sort of seizure (for lack of a better term and to help clarify to those not suffering from AIWS). The “seizure” starts out with extreme deja vu, then what I hear starts to speed up as things around me seem to slow down. The first time this happened to me I thought I was losing my mind and my mom thought I might be having a stroke. Fast forward several years and I was still suffering from them every couple of weeks, and stress seemed to bring them on. I told my general practitioner about my “seizures” and she sent me to a neurodiagnostician who immediately diagnosed me with a rare form of migraine called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. It is called AIWS because, for many sufferers, surroundings will become larger and then smaller as they did in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In fact, Carroll suffered from migraine and many things in Alice in Wonderland are based on his symptoms. For example, the Cheshire Cat was what he saw when he had a pre-migraine aura. I am so very thankful to have finally been diagnosed and hope that this entry might help someone else who is suffering from this very scary but also very treatable disorder.

My grandma is 90 years old and just finished her five week radiation treatment in Nashville at the Sarah Cannon Cancer Center. I think many people her age would have just given up with a cancer diagnosis, but she is no normal 90-year-old. She has more energy than my mom and me combined. The last month has been extremely hard on all of us, with mom staying in Nashville with granny at The American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge and me staying here at granny’s house over an hour away. I am so thankful to have them both back “home” and for granny to finally be finished with treatments. We now are waiting a month to find out if the radiation worked so everyone continues to pray for her. She has very little energy right now and is suffering from radiation brain fog, both of which will soon pass. We are all eager to have her back to normal and very thankful to have had the opportunity to receive treatment from Sarah Cannon.

I’m not necessarily giving up on publishing a book so much as I’m making room for more entries in my 43 things. But to have a book published you have to write one first and that’s already on my list and in progress. So this must go for now.