The day everything stopped

I'd just spent three weeks crossing Europe by train. Sleepers, seat reservations, hotels booked around rail timetables — the kind of trip you plan for years and remember forever. I came home on a Saturday. On Sunday I had a seizure.

I don't remember most of it. What I remember is what came after: the hospital, and a doctor explaining, kindly, that I couldn't drive for at least six months. I drove buses for a living.

A PCV licence isn't like a car licence. After a seizure, the bar to get it back is years — five, possibly ten. Nobody could tell me exactly, which was somehow worse. The job I was good at, the routine I'd built a life around, ended in a day I mostly can't remember.

There's a particular kind of unfairness in losing work through no fault of your own. Nothing to appeal, nobody to be angry at. Your body made a decision and everyone else just has to comply with it — including you.

I didn't know it yet, but this was the start of something, not just the end of something. It didn't feel like that in October. In October it just felt like the day everything stopped.