The Epileptic Event

Alyssa

12/4/12

The Epileptic Event

Hearing the halftime whistle blow during a sports game can be a true relief.  But one Saturday in September, one girl didn’t come off the field. Halftime had been called and there was something that we didn’t realize.

                  “Kay girls, bring it in,” our coach Larry said as he high-fived all of us coming in for our water break.  It wasn’t sunny but the air was so cold that day that it was burning our lungs.  The fog hung low in the air and clusters of crows dotted the field. The grass was so damp it had soaked through our grass packed cleats. We were exhausted and it was only halftime. The score was 4-2 and we were in the lead.

 “Where’s Ayla?” Larry said. Ayla was one of the more soft spoken girls on our team so maybe she was just behind someone. We all looked around and saw her on the field looking down at the grass. She probably lost a hair tie or something, we all thought to ourselves. But it was only a few seconds later that we started to doubt our predictions.  She started stumbling backwards like there was someone pushing her from the front.  She fell down flat on her back and her hands were spasming like crazy.

“Oh god!” Larry exclaimed.  He dropped his clipboard and ran straight for Ayla. Her parents got up from their chairs on the sidelines and ran over, with Ayla’s baby twin siblings in hand. The twins, a boy and a girl, began to cry and scream. Their parents gave them a quiet but assertive hush as they kept sprinting across the field.  They had a look on their faces that told us they knew what was going on.  As they got closer to her, her hands stopped moving.

The other teams coach had a concerned yet perturbed look on his face as he came over to our team. He had on a black sports jacket and a bright red baseball cap. His face was scrunched up like he was trying to see something.

“What’s going on here?” He said shrugging his shoulders glancing at our team and then looking back at the field.
“We know as much as you do right now.” I said passing a worried look around with my teammates.
         At that point Ayla was laying there completely still with a blank stare on her face.  Her skin had already been a fair tone but now she was pasty and clammy looking.  We weren’t even that close to her but we could still see her face. She was a pretty small girl and so seeing her small motionless figure laying in the middle of the field was really scary. To be honest, for a minute or two, I think our whole team thought she was possibly dead.

“Ayla,” we heard her mom say. “Wake up, come on hunny, we're gonna go home.” Her mom’s messy bun sat at the nape of her neck and her jeans peaked from under her baggy sweatpants as she bent over.  Soon enough, Ayla’s  head raised from the grass but her mom laid it back down on the ground.  

“You just take it easy.”

Alya closed her eyes.

Her parents looked at each other. Her dad took of the hood of his jacket and pushed his hair back. He took a deep breath and then looked back down at Ayla.

“ I’m gonna sit you up now but I want you to let me know if you feel dizzy, okay?”  he said.

Ayla’s eyelids quivered as she forced herself to open them. It looked like she was trying to say something but her words just wouldn’t come out. She turned her head a little. I guess her Dad took that as a yes.
He  tilted her back forward.

“Does that feel okay?” he asked.

She nodded weakly. She pushed her dark brown hair out of her face and let her dad carry her off the field. Relief washed over our whole team. We were hugging and just still standing there in disbelief.
Once on the other side, her parents wrapped her in a Mexican blanket. She looked back at us and managed a feeble smile.
When Larry came back over from helping Ayla’s family, the team was buzzing with questions.

“Is she gonna be okay? Where’s she going? What happened to her? Why did she fall over? Is she hurt?”

        
We later learned that Ayla had been diagnosed with epilepsy when she was little. She had had a seizure on the field.  She recovered quickly and was back playing with our team at the next practice.  In following weeks, she had recurrent seizures at school and at practices she would get bloody noses. She had gotten new medications that really weren’t helping her and they thinned her blood out a little too much which caused her to bleed really easily.  
“One time, when I was little,” she told us, “my aunt held me by my feet to try to stop my bloody nose. It didn’t work. Don’t try that at home.”  We all laughed at her stories because it seemed like she wanted us to. She was so open about the fact that her epilepsy was a part of her life, and it was one of those things that she couldn’t do anything about.  We all learned a lot from Ayla about how when something is in your way, you can’t spend all your time trying to make it better. Ayla also taught us to accept the things that we didn’t like about ourselves.  She didn’t like having seizures but it was something that she had to live with.   She scared us all on that one day but in the long run it taught us a lot about living life to the fullest even with the things that try to stand in our way.