Seizures Rob Man Of Past Former Teacher Now Serves School Lunches To Kids

Mike Sullivan slowly pours milk into each fuchsia cup and places it next to another cup, filled with canned apricots, and a plate of pizza and french fries.

When he is through, 12 lunches sit on tables next to chairs only 1 feet high. Sullivan turns to count the placings again, and checks his pocket notebook to make sure the numbers match.

A dozen girls and boys each less than waist-high to Sullivan come skipping and laughing into the lunchroom at the Ursuline Centre, calling “Hi, Mike,” and asking where the ketchup is.

Sullivan checks twice this day to make sure it really is ketchup. Two weeks ago, he accidentally served salsa with the fries. “I still make mistakes,” he says. “It’s frustrating.”

Ever since a series of seizures in 1989, Sullivan has had no short-term memory. The seizures slapped him with a brain injury that wiped out memories most people rely on to finish day-to-day tasks.

That is not only frustrating, it’s also a long way from the print shop Sullivan and his wife owned, and a long way from the teaching job he once held.

At $4.75 an hour, it’s an even longer stretch from the career goals Sullivan dreamed of when he earned his master’s degree in education. The dreams are still intact, but Sullivan’s teaching ability is not.

He looks like anyone; he acts like any man in Great Falls.

But the little memories from today, last week or last month - how many kids are eating lunch today, which bottle contains the ketchup - represent almost insurmountable struggles.

“There aren’t a whole lot of steps to my job: I serve lunch, sit down and eat with the kids and then clean up,” he says. “But it’s all I can handle.

“The funny thing is, I can never remember from day to day which table I sat at, and there are only three tables.”

The good part: The children adore him.

“Can I please have some more milk, Mike?” “It’s your turn to sit at our table, Mike. Sit next to me!” The bad part: “It’s pretty menial work. I’m the lunch man with the master’s degree.”

Sullivan’s wife, Charlene, is pleased to see her husband working. The job, which he began last August, is his first since the seizures stole their printing shop eight years ago. It wasn’t long after the seizures that they realized something was wrong with his memory and that they would have to sell the business they had run for 15 years.

“Mike gets real frustrated just serving lunch; he thinks it’s demeaning in a way,” Charlene says. “But he’s doing something worthwhile now and feels a lot better about himself.”

The loss of short-term memory hurts in other ways. Sullivan can no longer drive. He might forget where he’s going, and he’s had enough small seizures in recent years to prevent him from getting a license.

This week, his youngest son, who is about to graduate from high school, wrote Sullivan a note to remind him to turn off the stove before he left for work. Sullivan forgot anyway, only to remember when he looked at his notebook after arriving at the Ursuline Centre.

“I forget anything I don’t write down,” he says.

He calls his notebook, always in his shirt pocket, his “book of life.” In it are the detailed notes his wife wrote to teach him how to do his lunchroom job, and his own notes to remind him what he’s done day to day.

In it, too, is a note from a few years ago that another of his three sons wrote to wish him good luck on his teaching-certificate renewal test.

“I always keep this with me,” he says. “It’s one of the things that’s kept me going.”

Such little supports have become important to both of the Sullivans.

They attend the Roman Catholic Church together, and find strength there. Charlene Sullivan says the “Serenity Prayer” several times a day. And each looks to each other for strength.

“A woman of lesser character would have left me years ago,” Sullivan says.

The Sullivans also find help in the Great Falls Brain Injury Support Group, a small organization with gatherings they attend to discuss their lives, frustrations and tools for coping.

For Sullivan, life did an about-face within a matter of minutes. That July, he was at home playing the piano when he suddenly went into a series of violent seizures. The only explanation, he says, was mild epilepsy combined with fatigue and lack of eating from working long hours at the print shop.

The family rushed Sullivan to the hospital, where he awoke three days later.

When he left the hospital, Sullivan noticed he had lost something. He and his wife began realizing he’d undergone a huge change.

“We’d been to Disneyland the Christmas before, and I realized I couldn’t remember anything except the front gate,” he says.

They went to neurosurgeons and a neuropsychiatrist, who tested and tested and began explaining brain injuries.

Sullivan was angry at first, and learned that the sudden injury to his brain’s temporal lobe where short-term memory is stored also damaged his emotions. Mood swings are more frequent now.

“The emotional part is the most difficult,” he says. “How do you cope with all this emotionally, with your family holding you up? How do you let them focus on you instead of you helping them?”

But cope he does, one day at a time, checking in his “book of life” for clues on what to do next.

When he makes the inevitable mistakes, Sullivan tries to laugh.