That Time I Had Loads Of Fits And Pissed My Pants

Looking back, maybe my epilepsy was a reaction to stress or something

“Hold up lads!”

These were the last words I uttered before collapsing to the floor of the coffeeshop. Bang! I went down like Apollo Creed in Rocky 4. My body erupted into a demented, jerking, foamy mouthed seizure lasting three or four minutes. I knocked over tables and chairs, pissed my pants and ripped a fistful of hair out of my mate’s head as he tried to restrain me. What a spectacle.

I was seventeen years old. Four mates and I were on an Inter Railing trip around Europe. We were using stolen tickets that had been sold to us on the cheap by a bloke we knew from our local snooker club. The trip had been fun and stressful in equal measure. The drinking and adventure was great; but we were children really. We had hardly any money, even less common sense, knew nothing about where we were going, were hardly sleeping at all, were living off crisps and Coke and, it being 1992, we had no mobiles or other means of contacting home if we ran into trouble.

As I came around on that coffeeshop floor in Amsterdam, drenched in my own urine, my vision blurred and my head pounding, I deduced that I had officially run into trouble.

“Temple balls gets them every time!” chuckled the proprietor as he rearranged all the furniture I’d knocked over. He was referring to the particularly strong strain of hashish my mates and I had been smoking just prior to my epileptic episode. He thought it was funny. He was the cunt who’d just sold it to us!

That was my first full-on epileptic fit. But I’d had minor episodes before that should have served as warning signs.

When I was 12 I had to undergo my ‘cough and drop’ with the school nurse. In case you don’t know what a cough and drop is, it’s a school procedure for 12 year old boys where they cup your ball-bag and make you cough in order to check if your balls have dropped yet. My older brothers, who had been through the same procedure years beforehand, delighted in winding me up about the prospect. “The nurse grabs your bollocks and twists them really hard!” they warned. “If you get a hard-on, don’t worry, she keeps a metal spoon in a bowl of ice and whacks your knob with it at the first sign of trouble!”

As a result of these troubling stories I arrived in the nurses office on the big day consumed by anxiety. By the time she cupped my scrotum and asked me to cough it had all got too much. My head started to spin and I collapsed.

When I came too I was in the sick-bay, where all poorly kids were held. As I lay prostrate on a camp-bed in the corner, I noticed I had wet my pants. The next thing I noticed was Emma Ellis, the most popular and glamorous girl in the year, sitting opposite me. I had never had the courage to speak with Emma before. Now, all sweaty and covered in my own wee, didn’t seem like the most opportune moment. I tried a spluttering ‘hello’ but she just rolled her eyes.

Then the nurse came in and said: “Oh you’re awake Sam! I’m afriad you passed out and wet yourself during your cough and drop - but don’t worry we’ve called your mummy and she’s coming to pick you up.”

For fucks sake. I glanced again at Emma. She couldn’t even bring herself to roll her eyes now. She just looked embarrassed for me.

When my mum arrived the nurse told her: “When Sam was unconscious he started twitching on the floor in a peculiar manner. You should probably get him referred to a neurologist. Oh, and by the way, we also managed to establish that his left testicle is, as yet, undescended.”

We drove home in the rain, the piss drying slowly on my best school trousers as I peered silently out the window, wondering if Emma Ellis would ever consider dating an incontinent epileptic with one bollock. Can’t lie, it was a shit day.

After the Amsterdam incident I was told by a specialist never to smoke marijuana or drink alcohol again, advice I completely ignored. I had several more fits in the years that followed, sometimes while drunk and high, sometimes not.

Looking back, I realise that all of my fits took place when I was in states of high anxiety and stress. I don’t think it was just the temple balls that wiped me out in Amsterdam. I think it was partly the unacknowledged stress of bumming round Europe with my mates when I was barely grown up enough to tie my own fucking shoelaces. It felt wild being in the middle of faraway cities without any safety nets and a sense that there was always trouble lurking round the corner. But we all just got on with it, had some fun and didn’t allow ourselves to show each other any hint of fear or vulnerability.

Oh well, that’s just part of being a teenage boy I suppose. At least it was in those days. If my son ever asks to go Inter-Railing for a few weeks using tickets bought from a man in a snooker club I will (even when he’s 27, let alone 17) lock the dickhead in his room.

When I was 15, I was getting ready to go on my first proper date with my first proper girlfriend, Rebecca Hollingsworth, when I collapsed in my mum’s toilet and started twitching weirdly. The date was cancelled.

After completing 12 straight 10 hour shifts in a brand new job as a TV news reporter in my mid-twenties, I went home and suffered four consecutive seizures before being rushed to hospital in an ambulance and kept under observation for the weekend.

After West Ham beat Derby 5-1 in 1999, the day after my 24th birthday, I collapsed in a strangers front driveway on my way home, cutting my head open, having a fit and - you guessed it- pissing my pants again. That resulted in another weekend in hospital and six stitches in my nut.

These are just some of the highlights. I’ve been thinking about all of these incidents a lot recently because I reckon they were pretty traumatic. But at the time I sort of laughed them off. After the initial physical and emotional shock wore off, I quickly turned them into entertaining anecdotes. But all of those incidents were really fucking horrible. Coming round from a seizure is one of the most terrifying experiences I have ever endured. It’s strange: people are talking to you, trying to help you regain consciousness but it all seems other worldly; you’re floating above the room, unsure if you are alive or dead for about ten minutes. I feel sick just thinking about it.

Anyway, sometimes I wonder if those fits - some of them pretty massive - did any long term physical damage to my brain. I went for all the scans and stuff at the time and they decided I was ‘mildly’ epileptic but that I didn’t need medication. They predicted it would pass as I got older and that seems to have been the case. I haven’t had a seizure, thank Jeebus, since 2003.

The biggest learning I can draw from all of those messy incidents is that acknowledging my own stress is so important. So many blokes deny their stress to themselves and others: “I’m fine….I’m not angry…I’m not stressed….I’m not tired….I AM NOT FUCKING SHOUTING!” We are so conditioned to hide vulnerability and maintain a stoic image that we don’t even acknowledge to ourselves that we are feeling under pressure.

Once we do, it doesn’t need to be a big deal. Rest when you can. Eat properly. Talk to someone, maybe. But the biggest and most important step of all is just admitting to yourself: “Fuck, this is a bit scary.” Once you do that your body and mind can at least start to make sense of what the fuck is happening.

That said, I don’t think any calming internal convos could have saved me from the effects of that spliff in Amsterdam. It was 10am in the morning for fuck’s sake! Like that dickhead said: ‘temple balls, gets them every time.”

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Matt Morgan on The Reset Podcast

If you like any of my podcasts then you probably have Matt Morgan to thank in some small way. It was his legendary pod with Russell Brand in the noughties that lit the way for me. It was creative, anarchic and really made the most of the freestyle medium. I fucking loved it and have been a big fan of Matt’s ever since. I was delighted he joined me on this week;s pod to discuss parenthood, panic attacks and living with ADHD. Have a listen here.

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Some services, links and phone numbers to help you through the tough times

https://www.samaritans.org/ Tel 116 123

@calm 0800 58 58 58

@YoungMindsUK 0800 018 2138

@CharitySane 0300 304 7000

https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/

https://cocaineanonymous.org.uk/

https://andysmanclub.co.uk/

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/gambling-addiction/