The Phenomea of Comprised Neurological Function, Grand-Mal Seizures and God’s Mercy

James Yerry, March 2021.

Disclosure: I'm not a doctor but I know if you sock someone in the puss and get away with it that’s arguably pacifism. 

You’re probably going to think that I made this story up. God as my witness it’s true, and the details are too significant to be easily forgotten. There is no exaggeration in what I’m about to tell you, there is no gain in telling you an absurd farce for the sake of it. This is long and as usual I went of course a few times but stick with it if you want to read. 

My father was a good man, a Christian and a Law Enforcement Officer in that order. He was something of a natural athlete as well. I don’t think he was a racist, he was ignorant like all men and he had seen the worst in everyone regardless of their last name. Cops tend to see the bad side of people more than the good but when it came to seeing good there was no color prerequisite with my Dad; you were good, or you were an asshole, there was no grey area. You got bonus points of you played baseball for the Boston Red Sox or happened to be an American Indian. Dad was respectful of that part of his family’s lineage, tribe members got a free pass. 

When I was about seven or eight years old my father had a 2nd job working as a roofer when he wasn’t working as a Nassau County Police Officer. My father had no fear of heights and he didn’t waste time with no pansy-assed safety measures when there were nails and shingles to get hammed before the sun went down. One afternoon he fell from a 2nd story roof and was severely injured. I have glimpses of memories being told he would not live, saying goodbye (just in case) to this thing in a hospital bed. There are dusty memories of tubes and bags dangling from spindly stainless steel poles, dripping down into someone sleeping in that hospital bed. Weeks went by with him holding on long enough to suggest a specialist be brought in to perform a very experimental surgery; maybe more on that in a bit. 

My father survived that ordeal but afterwards he experienced seizures that had a habit of triggering at any given moment. Seizures are generally considered epileptic but are not exclusive to epilepsy Seizures are categorized into three severities; low to high: Petit Mal or "Absence Seizure", Grand-Mal, and Jacksonian. My father was prone to Grand-Mal; these are intense and uncontrollable, they can sometimes turn violent. A person having a Grand-Mal seizure can injure themselves and others. Understand despite my dads injuries he could still mop the floor with the best of them and his short fuse could barely be measured in angstroms. Seriously; despite spending months in a hospital bed on the razors edge of life and death from severe physical and neurological injuries my dad was still strong as freakin’ ox. Dad was prescribed Tegretol and Dilantin to help with this but every few months you could expect a seizure episode. Rokee (Short for Cherokee), the dog who had more friends than I ever will could pick up on them before it happened but that was far from the most interesting thing about that dog and I will regal you with tales of the “‘Mazin’ Rokachip” some other day. 

My father returned to work as an NCPD but was given a desk job. Dad had been studying to become a detective at the time of the accent but because of the potential for sudden seizures that was no longer an option. Sometime in my later teens my father fell off another roof cleaning gutters, this time it was ours. Again there was damage to his head. A second surgery where the doctors were flabbergasted to see what the first surgeon had done in the mid 70s using the limited resources available to him in the infancy of neurosurgery including wrapping part of his brain in plastic. My father continued to have periodic seizures, they could last a few minutes, but a few I remember going over a half hour. To this day if someone is having a seizure I'm confident I could aid them; this isn't bragging, I’ve had first hand experience with them since I was a kid

But at some point after his retirement my father began having seizures more frequently. My mother described to me that my dad sounded like he was trying to speak, but it was all gibberish. I asked her to record it on the cassette radio my dad would take on the back porch and chain smoke cigarettes and listen to the Red Sox broadcasts from across the Long Island sound under the night sky. My dads awareness of nature was preternatural, a story for another time though. I apologize for all this information, I’m remembering things I don’t want to loose as I write this.
My mother recorded the audio of with my father speaking what appeared to be and dismissively sounded to be nonsense but as I listened to it I could hear patterns and cadence and a tempo. I’m a musician (ok I'm a guitar player, I know how to play notes not read them), that tends alter the way you listen and hear as a necessary skill. I took the tape and transferred it into my Amiga computer, created a wave file, reversed the wave and played it back. What came out was my father was reciting (in its entirety) the Act of Contrition, which is sometimes called Act of Penance. The inflections were off due to the words being spoken in reverse but each word was clearly discernible.

The prayer begins;

“My God, I am sorry for offending thee”  

If you’re curious about the rest it's here; I’ve never memorized it and when my father would drag me to confession at St. Gertrudes church in Bayville, Long Island and the priest would suffer through my debauchery, and after he’d tell me: “Say three ‘Our Fathers’, two ‘Hail Mary’s’ and an ‘Act of Contrition’”. My most grievous sin; I didn’t want to tell him I could never remember the Act of Contrition. I’d substitute an Our Father or two atoning for my earthy transgressions. Despite the perpetual brain fart I had with this prayer My father could recite it forward and backwards, literally.

My father passed in October of 2001, by that time the athlete that could line drive baseballs between first and second and could get on base before the outfielder his mitts on it now required a wheel chair to get around, he had no recollection of what happened earlier in the day but tell you what type of tree he climbed to avoid Mr. Earnst throwing a cinderblock short of 100 feet to knock him out when Dad suggested to him the Nazi's were going to get their asses handed to them at the end of WWII. Dad would wheel to the kitchen door and open it a crack to technically smoke outside since it was banned in the house . Rain, snow or inclement weather that door would be open blowing smoke back in the house. Dad was the post office of smoking. He could literally fall out of that chair, lay on the floor immobilized and finish his cigarette. He was in terrible shape by then and it's fortunate that at his wake my brothers best friend Codge who is a funeral director had him dressed in his officers uniform. NCPD posted a police honor guard at the casket and a full police escort to the Locust Valley Cemetery, our cemetery was designed by Fredrick Olmestead, the guy who designed Central Park, it's stunningly beautiful . I'm fortunate to have this memory of him, it restored much of what was taken from him in his lifetime but he never complained about it. He complained about having to smoke on the floor, but not the seizures and physical damage he suffered.

Locust Valley Cemetery, Locust Valley, NY

To this day that phenomenon of my father reciting this prayer, in its entirety and entirely backwards both amazes me and terrifies me. It’s amazing because; how insanely amazing was that!? It was terrifying because I think about his mind buried under layers of a Grand-Mal seizure was trapped beneath it all consciously beseeching Almighty God to forgive his sins and deliver him through this punishment. 

Years later I was at a medical event with my Father-in-law and this event I spoke with pair of brain surgeons over viking sized martini's. Admittedly I have at most the most rudimentary knowledge of the brain and the science of seizures but I knew enough to converse causally on this topic. When I mentioned the episode with my dad and his reverse recital of words they both stopped me. “Bullshit.” they said “it’s not possible”.They weren’t having it, they dismissed me, dismissed my claims, dismissed even the possibility of this.  My Father-in-Law; Pop Pop, as the girls call him is highly respected in the fields of medicine by many other doctors; smart doesn’t begin to cover it and even until very recently was retained by a handful of NYC law firms for his insight and expert testimony on medical malpractice court cases. Now in his mid 90s Pop Pop is as sharp as a scalpel. I explained I had nothing to gain from lying to them, and my father-in-law was attending this event, why would I try to embarrass him by inquiring if they had insights? They shut me out, and laughed at the notion.

In some daydream a neurological researcher comes across this, connects the dots and gains insight into the treatment of Grand-Mal seizures from my stumbling here. Obviously this scenario is so remote that in the off chance someone did accomplish something with this information my name would be nowhere to be found. As I close this out I really don’t know if I spoke about a medical phenomenon that only I appear to have witnessed first hand or if I just wanted to write about my dad and remember event that will undoubtedly get lost in time.

My God, I am sorry for offending thee