Epileptic, Oklahoma

(note: this was written many years ago, before my seizures were under control)

The hospital came to a halt when every window in the complex began to rattle uncontrollably. In the distance a low and unnatural thunder rolled its way across the flat horizon. When the rattling glass and thunder had ceased, all that remained was silence: no one spoke; phones did not ring; the air was sill; birds had stopped singing. For a brief moment it seemed as though the world had stopped breathing and this peaceful silence was Death's harbinger. This silence awakened a horror that would stalk me the rest of my life.

At approximately 9:30 in the morning on April 19th 1995, a chorus of ringing phones throughout the hospital, where I worked, broke the silence. When I answered my station's phone I discovered it was the National Disaster Preparedness Team (I was just assigned to this team three months prior) signaling for all members to scramble immediately.

Before I knew what was going on, I was standing knee deep in what once had been the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. At 9:01 that morning, a bomb had ripped a hole in the center of downtown Oklahoma City. I was assigned to search and recovery.

All day I sifted through the twisted rubble and dust. With each piece of concrete I lifted, I hoped to find someone. My body was in sad shape: my mouth was dry; my head was pounding; my muscles ached and throbbed; eyes burned from all the dust and fumes that choked the air. After three and a half hours of searching I made my first and last recovery: a head.

I was mesmerized and sickened by what I held. The sheer oddity of it was unreal. I knew that I was staring at a person's decapitated head. The fact that it was inside a broken computer monitor and had become fused with the glass and plastic made it difficult to accept. That is when everything went silent again, and then faded to black.

I was informed later that I had been rushed to a local hospital because I had suffered several grand mal seizures. Apparently the stress of what I had seen and experienced triggered the seizures. The silence I experienced in the rubble is called an aura. It is my body's signal that a seizure is coming. The only way I have ever been able to describe it is by that silence I experienced the day the bomb went off in Oklahoma City--like the Earth herself stopped breathing. Considering I have at least one seizure every month, I am constantly reminded of that day and of the head within a broken monitor.