It is officially my birthday in the Pacific Northwest

For a while there I had some bad birthday juju going on. One year, on the morning of my birthday, my husband had a grand mal seizure in his sleep while laying right next to me. It was horrifying. He was sort of screaming and thrashing in the bed. I was sound asleep and this is what I woke up to...on my birthday.

It was a pretty severe event for the whole family. Of course the girls heard him yelling and came running into our room. They were 13 and 7 years old at the time. I had the oldest one call 911 while I tried to figure out what to do next. His seizure seemed like it lasted a really long time. Trust me, there was no way I was going to attempt to hold his tongue down like most of us have heard you're supposed to do at some point in our lives.

Once the seizure itself stopped, he was sitting in the floor beside the bed looking very bewildered. I put a blanket around him and just stayed near him as the girls were telling the 911 dispatcher what had happened. We lived in a rural area with a fine group of volunteer fire fighters who are the first responders whenever 911 was called. I was active in several community organizations and knew most of the those volunteers who came to help us that morning, on my birthday.

Eventually my husband seemed to recognize where he was, but he didn't seem to be able to say anything at first. A rare moment. He would just look at us like were speaking a foreign language when we would ask him something simple, like "Do you know where you are?" Then, as his brain began rewiring his mental circuitry, I asked the question I was sure he would know the answer to: "Do you know my name?" He looked at me and shook his head 'yes' and really seemed to be trying to remember what it was. We had been together 9 years, so chances were good he could get this one right. I could see he was struggling to come up with my name, so I said, "It's okay, my name is Rege." And to that he said: "I knew that. I was trying to remember your last name." Oh - my - goodness. If that's not a batchelor come back line I don't know what is. So I told him, "It's the same as yours. I'm your wife." I'm not sure he believed me at first.

When the Fire Department showed up, Guy H was among the first to arrive at our house. My husband knew him before the seizure happened. He said to Guy, "Why are you in my bedroom, Guy?" Guy looked at me. I looked at Guy. We both chuckled a little and smiled at each other. Guy explained, again, that he was there because we had called 911 because "you" had a seizure. You just had to be there. Guy will understand this.

I took my husband to the hospital and we sat in the ER most of the day. He was hooked up to IV's and pumped full of some horrid medicine. Thus began the eventual decline of a marriage that wasn't doing too bad until then.

Everything changed. I bought our first cell phone, one of those folding clunky box things with the antenna you had to raise, so the girls could always call me if I wasn't home from work yet since it was a 15-20 mile drive to do errands in town. He thought that was ridiculous and let me know it. But, essentially, he wasn't really "there" when he had the seizure. We were. He couldn't drive for 6 months after having the seizure. He couldn't go back to work for almost a month. The employees at the mill where he worked were extremely supportive. Many of his co-workers had the employer take money out of their own pay checks and give the money to us to help us get by until he could return to work. He actually damaged his rotator cuff in his shoulder from how violent the seizure was on his body. It was a pretty traumatic experience for all of us, on my birthday.

Then there was the year I took my youngest daughter skiing at Willamette Pass for my birthday. Yeah, that was painful. But that's another story.

Yeah, I've been working on making sure I have much better birthdays for the past 10 or so years. So, here's to another good birthday this year. I have to wait to celebrate until my last class is over next week. But I'm good with that. I have many exciting things coming my way. I can just feel it in my bones.

Now, if someone will just bake me a cake...