score.

The waiting room was crowded.

An elderly man rested both hands on a walker.

A woman in scrubs bounced a sleeping toddler on her shoulder.

A teenage boy in a cast tapped his sneaker against the leg of his chair.

The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, and the television near the ceiling was playing a home renovation show with the volume too low to follow.

I remember all of it because an aura makes the world feel overdefined.

The ordinary details glow right before they vanish.

At 2:47 p.m., the metallic taste hit my mouth.

I knew immediately.

My skin went cold.

Sound seemed to retreat from the room.

The edges of everything softened and sharpened at the same time.

I leaned toward my mother and whispered that it was happening.

I needed help.

She did not look up at first.

She just kept staring at her phone and muttered that it was awfully convenient I was having an episode in a hospital, right where people could watch me perform.

Her voice was low, but the contempt in it was familiar enough to make my stomach clench even through the aura.

I gripped the armrests of my chair.

My fingers were already stiffening.

I told her please.

That finally made her turn.

She seized my arm so hard that her nails bit through my sleeve.

Her face was arranged in a mask of maternal frustration, the kind strangers interpret as weary concern.

Between clenched teeth, she told me to stop embarrassing her.

Then the floor dropped out from under the world.

What happened next lived at first as flashes: cold tile against my cheek, bodies moving, my forehead exploding in pain, a voice far away shouting for security.

Later it became a sequence I could replay from the hospital security footage.

The camera showed me sliding from the chair as the convulsions took over.

It showed my mother not stepping back, not clearing the table, not calling for help.

Instead she grabbed my upper arm and tried to drag me upright.

When my body would not obey her, she pulled harder, dragging me across the floor.

My head struck the corner of the coffee table hard enough to split the skin at my hairline.

A woman near reception stood so fast that her purse spilled across the floor.

A nurse vaulted the desk and dropped to her knees beside me, shouting for my mother to let go.

My mother did the opposite.

She kept insisting I was faking.

She kept reaching for me even while my limbs jerked.

She told the room I did this all the time, that I was manipulative, that she was the one forced to live with my behavior.

Her voice rose with every word, becoming shriller, less controlled, more frantic.

Then Dr.

Martinez appeared at the end of the hall, took in the scene in a single glance, and started giving orders so sharply that people moved before they had time to think.

A gurney arrived.

Security arrived.

Gauze appeared against my forehead.

Someone turned me on my side.

Someone else took my vital signs.

And when my mother reached for my bag, Dr.

Martinez asked for my medication bottle.

I woke up in the emergency department with a pounding head, aching muscles, and the