Already Seen

6 May 2009, 20:00

Early morning, between about 5 and 6 am, is when, should I have the misfortune of finding myself wake, I mull over odd things, often things that make me anxious or perplexed. This morning, for some reason, I started to muse about the intense episodes of deja vu I sometimes experience and whether they might be linked to the aneurysm.

A couple of times a year I have extreme deja vu “sessions” that last anywhere from half an hour to an hour. I never thought to have them “checked out” by a G.P, thinking they’d more than likely send me to a funny farm than to a radiologist (I mean, who the hell goes to the doctor for a deja vu?), but they were definitely different to the occasional fleeting deja vu that I imagine are rather common. Sometimes (but not always) they were followed by a “petit-migraine” – vision disturbances and slight headache/nausea but not the full-on migraine.

I remember the first time I experienced the prolonged deja vu – it was 1991 and I was in a friend’s car, driving from Sanctuary Cove back to Brissie after an afternoon jet skiing. I was sitting in the backseat of the car and pretty much had colourful deja vus the entire drive (which wouldn’t usually be so long, but friend had penchant for dope so journey was a stone’s throw longer than it could have been).

Interestingly (OK, interesting for me) it then occurred to me that 1991 was the year my headaches were bad enough to pack me off to a G.P, so I wonder if the combo was an early sign of the annie – they can take 20-30 years to “grow” so that could have been the year it started bulging. Deja vus are often linked to temporal lobe epilepsy and although my aneurysm was in my right frontal lobe, it still may explain the vividness of the episodes, particularly as the frontal lobe is responsible for long-term memory.

Or I may be clutching at straws – trying to put context and meaning around the last 30 odd years of my life, assuming the vessel wall weakened over time.

Guess I’ll never know. But it’s in my nature to keep on guessing.

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