a day ago
My personality changed and my behavior was erratic - people thought I was drunk but I had a serious condition
Michael King was a completely healthy 31-year-old when he suddenly started randomly clapping his hands and yelling: 'Woo-hoo!'
His roommate first noticed this odd behavior while watching a sports game with him and two other friends in 1991.
It would later happen again while King, now 64, was taking a romantic stroll along Newport Beach, near Los Angeles, with his then-girlfriend-now-wife, Donnita.
'Why did you do that?' she had asked in the moment. 'Do what?' he had replied.
He had no recollection of his outburst. Nor, did he know he was suffering from complex partial epileptic seizures, meaning the medical phenomenon started in one part of the brain and traveled to others.
He would go on to deny these occurrences were ever happening, as he never remembered them, and wrote his closest confidants off as crazy.
It wasn't until he was training for a new bartending job in Costa Mesa after being fired from the Hard Rock Café that he had to face reality. During an all-team meeting, he had another outburst, unbeknownst to him. The next day, they fired him, claiming they 'over hired'.
When he emotionally told a friend, Diane, who also worked there, that he had just been let go, she asked if he was okay. When she asked again, he realized something had happened.
'I just stood there as it hit me,' he wrote in his memoir, Be There When I Return. 'I hadn't believed them before, but it was hard not to believe them now.'
This would begin King's journey to getting a diagnosis of epilepsy, going through a risky surgery, and eventually coming out the other side seizure-free.
But his journey was anything but easy and even led him to his Los Angeles rooftop - boombox playing his favorite songs, toes over the ledge, frustrated after years of medications not stopping his erratic seizures.
He had considered jumping, but he didn't.
'I went down the dark hole of why me. What did I do to deserve this? It felt like a life sentence because the medication wasn't working,' King told the Daily Mail.
'My personality changed,' he continued. 'Before the seizures, I was a bartender at the Hard Rock Café in LA - it was like the hottest place there. I would go out and get recognized, and it felt good, people looking at you.'
After the seizures began, he would become more withdrawn, worried that the gazes of others meant he had another seizure, had inappropriately begun clapping and yelling: 'Woo-hoo,' unable to stop any of it.
'When I would go out and see people looking at me, I would think: 'Oh, did I just do something? Did I just have a seizure?'' he recalled.
'A lot of times it would just feel safer and better just to stay home, not go out. So it changed my personality.'
King, who at the time wanted to be an actor, jumped from bartender job to bartender job, unable to hold one down due to his condition.
He grappled with whether or not he should be upfront about his disease with employers or hide it as best he could.
It wasn't until he got a job at Giggles that he truly saw how supportive his coworkers were. One bartender even helped distract customers while King was having an episode, often saying he was just playing around or helping it look like he was dancing to the music. His bosses also helped support him.
Despite finding a balance at work, it didn't ease King's frustrations. He was taking high dosages of several anti-seizure medications and finding zero relief. For years, he upped dosages, changed medication, prayed for it all to stop, worried it wouldn't.
It wasn't until his sister, Karen, called him one day to tell him about a surgery one of her former classmates, who was also epileptic, had where doctors removed parts of her right temporal lobe to stop her seizures.
After more than five years of no relief, King was ready to try anything.
After several phases of testing and undergoing two surgeries where doctors placed strips along the indents of his brain to test where the seizures were originating, he got the surgery - despite the risks.
Doctors had warned him, Donnita, and his parents that he could suffer short-term or long-term memory loss from the surgery.
He said his mom and Donnita were fearful that there was the possibility that he would not remember them when I returned from surgery. But miraculously, he did.
'When I came out of surgery, and I was in ICU, I remember seeing three objects next to me that started to get clearer. One was the girlfriend. So I reached up, held her hand and kissed it. And then saw my parents and waved, and then went back to sleep,' he told the Daily Mail.
This is also the moment that inspired his book title, Be There When I Return, as he was hoping he'd remember them post-surgery. It also referred to his wife.
'She was always there when I returned from these seizures,' he said.
He would go on to have a few seizures following the surgery, which is normal. And for many years after, he still took high dosages of anti-seizure medication.
Eventually, he would titrate off them and he is now completely off medication and still seizure-free.
Now, he wants to help raise awareness of the disease that affects every one in 26 Americans.
The condition affects 65million people worldwide and 60 percent of them have no known cause for it.
King, himself, is unclear what triggered his own. Although, he largely suspects it stems from being fired from the Hard Rock Café.
'That was a very stressful and a very emotional moment,' he told the Daily Mail.
'I said in the book, I don't remember how I got home. There's two different ways I usually went home, and if someone said: 'Which way did you get home?' I wouldn't be able to tell you so.
'I started thinking, what else, if there was any other possibility. If I had played football and had seven concussions, and I would go: 'Well, maybe that's it.' But there wasn't, there was nothing else.
'I think that's the frustrating thing for doctors. It's all over the board, and there's not just one answer on why this this happens.'
Until 2020, King had no plans on sharing his story and only began writing his memoir at his wife's encouragement.
He credits Donnita with keeping him alive and is one of the reasons he chose not to take his life at his lowest point.
'Honestly, if she wasn't there, I think things would have ended differently on the rooftop in the first chapter,' he said.
Now, he credits her for the existence of this book.
'If not for my wife, I would have taken this to the grave,' he said.
He hopes his story will help bring awareness to others and to educate the masses on the disease that is often misunderstood.
'The only thing I knew about epilepsy is what I had seen in movies or on TV,' King revealed. 'And someone said: 'Oh, you know, Bobby's having an epileptic seizure, and he's on the ground.'
'And that's why when the doctor said it, I looked at my girlfriend. I was thinking: 'Did he not hear what you described?' I said: 'I don't fall on the ground. I don't do that.' And that's when the doctor said: 'Well, there's numerous types of epilepsy.'
He also hopes one day his story could be made into a movie.
And although a younger version of himself would have jumped at the opportunity to appear on screen, he's hoping a fellow St. Ignatius College Preparatory School alumni - Darren Criss, of Glee fame - would play him.
But whether or not his story makes it to the screen, he just wants to get his story out there for those who need it most.
