Eventually, I got to go home.
But leaving the hospital makes you want to believe the story is over.
Whatever happened, happened… there. Now you go home.
You get back to normal. Except we still didn't really know why it happened.
We knew my ammonia had risen to several times what it should have been.
Doctors explained that the high ammonia was affecting my brain. Hepatic encephalopathy.
There was now a medical term for why I couldn't find the bathroom or say my wife's name.
But knowing what happened wasn't the same as knowing why. And I really wanted to know why. Wouldn’t you?
Mostly because I wanted to know how to prevent it from ever happening again.
I walked back into the same house where I had lost my mind and kept thinking:
What just happened? How do I prevent it from happening again? Will it happen again?
That last question stuck with me. During the day, there were distractions:
Work.
Kids.
Appointments.
Life.
Night was different.
Every night I had to go back to bed. And the last time I had gone to lie down because I didn't feel right, I woke up unable to find the bathroom in my own house.
So I would lie there wondering: Will I wake up losing my mind again? That was the part that scared me.
The first time, I didn't know I was confused. Everyone else did.
I thought they were the ones not making sense. How do you prevent something you might not even recognize while it's happening?
I wanted someone to tell me exactly what happened and exactly what I needed to do to make sure it never happened again.
Nobody could give me that. Not yet anyways.
So I went to bed. And I closed my eyes anyway.