When I was born, the tattoo on my earlobe said 93.16690326. That translates into 93 year, 2 months, 11 days, 4 hours and 6 minutes. A time that clicks over in about fifteen minutes. Most people would claim that this is enough time. Enough time to live a good life. To accomplish something. For me, it has been way, way too much.
In my eleventh year, I developed a brain tumor. It started small and grew slowly. Very slowly. I did not know about it until I started getting headaches when I was thirteen. Even then, it took another two years for people to diagnosis it as an'oligodendroglioma'[1] . Incurable, they said and, of course by then the seizures had started.
I've spent the last 78 years and more trying to escape from this life. From the daily grand mals. From the constant headaches. The intracranial pressure. They cut a hole in my head to try and relieve that when I was twenty. Which makes for 73 years of wearing a helmet. Anything to escape from the pain and the torment and the complete uselessness of it all.
That's what gets me the most: the uselessness. I could have really done something with 93 years. Written a book. Became a musician, an artist. I could have invented something, started a company, made the world better. Started a family. Instead, I spent those 93 years battling something that wanted me dead. Something that I also wanted dead. Unfortunately, the only way to kill it was to kill me.
God knows, I tried. I've jumped off bridges and buildings. Run in front of buses and trains. I've taken poisons. I've stabbed myself with increasingly larger knives. I've shot myself in all parts of my body. I even built myself a guillotine and chopped my own head off. That was when I was 52. All that did was turn me into a head without a body. At least there have been fewer things to flail during the seizures.
Forty-one years later, I'm still alive. I've spent the intervening time staring at the clock. Watching the numbers move forward. Enduring the pain for one more second. Then another. Then another. Every one of them marches me closer to the end. To death. To release. The clock now says that there are ten seconds left. Just enough time to feel one more headache twinge. Now five. Four. Three. Two. One.
