Our son’s journey began with a challenging start, marked by a brain haemorrhage at birth. His life has been a testament to resilience, navigating through autism, partial paralysis, and epilepsy. Each condition presents its own unique set of hurdles, and when they converge, they can inflict severe torment.
As our son’s seizures have intensified, he has been experiencing longer periods of unconsciousness, often followed by almost complete memory loss. As I stand by him, supporting him through his trials, I am filled with a profound sense of wonder and concern about what his mind and consciousness endure during these increasingly frequent episodes.
Experts have told me that during his seizures, our son’s mind experiences a void, a state of nothingness until he regains consciousness. Yet, in his recovery, he often refers to things we cannot comprehend and calls out names we do not recognise. There are even moments during his seizures when he seems to be smiling. I attribute this to a grimace or a Gelastic seizure, but I can’t help but wonder if, in his extreme pain, his mind has found a place that brings him relief.
When he was five years of age, our doorbell rang. Our son looked out the window and declared, “It’s Uncle Judd.” We opened the door, and nobody was there. Judd had passed away some months earlier.
This story is fiction, but I have sought to explore an answer to my question of where our son’s mind may go during his unconsciousness. My protagonist and all the characters are figments of my imagination. However, it would be accurate to say that I have drawn upon our family observations and experiences supporting our son over the years as the basis for the premise: what if …
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