Monday, May 20, 2013

Brothers Helping Brothers

Family can be a wonderful thing.  Obviously I never would have found my new job if I hadn't been looking in this area, which I never would have done had I not been invited by Ian and Amanda.  But there are other nice things about people that I am legally connected to.

I haven't talked to too many people about it, but for the last few years I've been experiencing "seizure-like" episodes where I feel disoriented and fatigued and I lose the ability to speak or comprehend reading for a few minutes afterwards.  As far as I'm aware, only Allison, my Dad, and (most recently) Ian and Amanda have witnessed one of these episodes.  The reason I bring it up here is that I had a really bad one this week where I actually blacked out for about thirty or forty seconds.  That's a new and disturbing development.

As I thought about it, I remembered that Isaac had had episodes of epilepsy, so I called him up to compare notes.  Turns out, he probably never had epilepsy, but had episodes of not getting enough oxygen to his brain.  This makes sense to me.  I have terrible allergy symptoms, but every allergy test I've taken (and I've had several) comes up negative.  I often have trouble breathing when exercising.  I suffer from sleep apnea (and there's been at least one day that I've had waking apnea).  I was thinking that my breathing problems and my "seizure-like" episodes were separate, but there's a very good chance that they're related.  Obviously, I need to still see a doctor when my health insurance kicks in, but now I've got a much better idea of what could be causing my problems.

In addition to Isaac, I spoke to Bryan (a different kind of brother) recently about my job.  Since I'm a Business Development Coordinator and he just finished his MBA, I just called him and asked if he had any pointers.  As it turns out, Bryan worked for a while at an engineering firm and so he's actually familiar with what I'll be doing.  He made suggestions about communication styles and ways to proactively improve my knowledge of the industry and increase my importance to the company.  It was very beneficial for me and I could tell that Bryan totally has that explaining gene that all Larsen men have because he seemed to enjoy the chance to tell me what he knew.

Isn't family a wonderful thing?

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