It might only have been second place, but for Auburn resident Paul Kozmo, 62, his runner-up finishes in the 800- and 1,500-meter races at the Hawaii Senior Games in October rang of personal victory.

For the better part of a decade, Paul has been undergoing treatment for epilepsy, treatment that included the removal of parts of his right temporal lobe as well as a part of the brain called the hippocampus.

For many who have undergone surgery as radical as Paul has, just being able to walk might have been a challenge.

For Paul, however, a standout middle distance runner in high school and later at Clemson University, the feat was about so much more than a time.

“I was a guy who used to run a half-mile in 1 minute, 52 seconds,” he said. “So what does a 2:30 half-mile mean to me?

“But you know what it brought me?” Paul continued. “It brought a piece of me back that I’m very, very proud of.”

Vietnam

The origins of Paul’s battle with epilepsy reach back four decades to his tours of duty in Vietnam.

After attending Clemson on an athletic scholarship and participating in the school’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, Paul was assigned to a supply company in Chu Lai as a quartermaster.

It was during his three years in Vietnam that Paul said he suffered the injuries that led to the development of epilepsy, even though he had no idea about it at the time.

“I thought I’d escaped injury,” he said. “Fortunately, I never suffered a direct hit, but there were a lot of close calls.

“In Vietnam, unless you were infantry, you didn’t get a steel helmet,” Paul said. “You just wore those cotton bush hats.”

With his skull unprotected, Paul said the numerous and repetitive close calls took their toll.

“I was just banging my head on jeeps and getting thrown out of vehicles,” he said. “In 1972, though, when we were getting out, they didn’t give any credence to that. It wasn’t until the Iraq War that they started to understand that those types of explosions could cause brain injury. You don’t have to have a penetrating skull fracture to have brain damage, just the shocks alone. And that’s turning out to be the source of my epilepsy and most of my disabilities."

Unaware of the damage to his brain, Paul went about building a life with his wife, Trisha, whom he met at college, taking a job as a quality control manager for the K-Mart Corporation in Asia.

Slowly, however, the symptoms of epilepsy began to manifest, although they went undiagnosed for many years.

“There were little instances, that until we went to the VA in 2002 and they taught us about epilepsy, we didn’t know about,” he said. “I had been suffering from this illness for about 25 years, and it had been gradually building until it became catastrophic in 1994.”

Unawareness seizures

“The reason it was not something that something people could distinguish was because a lot of the symptoms are everyday things that people attribute to other things,” Trisha explained. “They are unawareness seizures because you and the people around you aren’t aware they are going on.

“If he had fallen down on the ground and had a seizure and was shaking and lost consciousness, people would know,” she said. “But what happened to Paul was very gradual. And the unfortunate thing was that because it was hidden and slow, it did more damage. If it was more overt people would have put more weight to it, he could have been on medication for it and could have had a different lifestyle that might not have damaged his brain and hippocampus like it did.”

Time after time, Paul’s symptoms, things like sleep apnea, weight gain and high blood pressure, were overlooked as stand-alone ailments rather than as parts of a larger problem.

“It stayed undiagnosed for so long because the symptoms, dizziness, confusion and lack of sleep, were also a part of my job,” Paul added. “They could look at my job and say ‘of course you’re under stress.’”

“He was traveling through a lot of time zones,” Trisha said. “Dinners up late followed by early mornings. And you go to the doctor because your blood pressure is a little high, and they would say, ‘Of course, you’ve just travelled through three different time zones and logged 8,000 miles.'

“They didn’t look at that as a symptom of a disease, because no one knew the illness was there,” she said.

Eventually, Paul thinks the epilepsy seizures cost him his career.

“I basically believe that through my seizures I ruined my reputation, doing things that were just unheard of,” he said. “They won’t tell you that when they decide to let you go, but I’m convinced now from what I’ve heard.”

Paul recalls what happened during a job interview.

“This guy bangs his fist down on the table and says, ‘Paul, we’re going to pay you this much, what are you going to do for us?” he said. “And I seized. I was prepared for the question. It wasn’t a shocking question. But I just sat there and stared and stared and stared. When I snapped out of it, I thought 10 or 15 seconds later, I answered the question.”

Paul said he later learned that the blackout had actually lasted 22 minutes.

“That’s when I knew this thing was serious,” he said. “I came back home three months later.”

Diagnosis

In 2002, Paul and Trisha were in an accident on state Route 18.

As a result, they were examined at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital at American Lake in Lakewood

“We weren’t hurt, it was just a bump,” Trisha said. “But we went to the hospital, and that’s where the nurse (neurologist specialist Jennifer Winston-Heath) looked at Paul and asked what his EEG (electroencephalogram) said.”

A scan of the electrical activity in his brain soon revealed the damage.

“It was very distinct,” Trisha said. “Right temporal lobe. All of the misfirings were there, classic textbook.”

Because the symptoms went ignored for so long, Trisha said Paul’s hippocampus suffered so much damage that surgery was required to remove it.

“It’s like your search engine,” she said of the small section of the brain that controls declarative and spatial memory. “It got so overworked, like a computer that said I can’t work anymore. Like it couldn’t call up the information that you want. Or it would give you the wrong information.”

For both Paul and Trisha, the diagnosis was a double-edged sword.

“When this declared itself and we had this answer, we were relieved, but scared at the same time,” Trisha said.

Treatment

Because of the extent of the damage, doctors put Paul on medications to treat his illness.

“They would either make him very sharp and clear and hurt an organ that no one could see or they would confuse him more,” Trisha said.

With medication ineffective, surgery became the best option for Paul.

“Because my seizure source was very isolated, I was a perfect surgery candidate,” he said. “If it’s in one area they’ll go in and remove it. If it’s spread out all through your brain they won’t do it.”

On Aug. 14, 2006 surgeons resected his right temporal lobe.

“They removed four centimeters, and they removed my entire right hippocampus,” he said.

“The operation was very successful in terms of reducing, but not eliminating, my seizures,” Paul said.

Unfortunately, the operation also resulted in what Paul calls “collateral damage,” to his optical and aural nerves.

“They moved things around to do the operation,” he said.

As a result, Paul is now legally blind and has 25 percent hearing loss.

With the loss of the hippocampus, however, other side effects soon arose.

A stranger to himself

At first, Trisha said they thought they had found a cure.

“We thought, ‘They can operate. They can do this,' ” she said. "But the reality is that you’re missing a part of your brain and with it part of your personality. You’re not the same person you were, and never are going to be again.”

“What has confused a lot of people is that there was no damage to the left side of my brain,” Paul said. “That’s the side that controls your speech, your vocabulary. That’s the artistic side. I can tell you 30 jokes right now but they are all just stories as far as the brain is concerned. It really bothered me that I could do that.”

“The irony of that is that, yes he’s telling the joke, but guess where the humor comes from?” Trisha said. “The right side of the brain. He doesn’t find the jokes funny.

“I just don’t have the emotional output,” Paul said. “I could make myself laugh if I really wanted to do, but it’s not that emotional response. Another of my problems is that I remember how I used to be,” he said. “And I know what I’m like now and I don’t like myself. I can be very hard on myself.”

Because of his age and the extent of his illness, Paul said he must make do and find ways to deal with the side effects.

“I can’t be rehabilitated, my brain is too old,” he continued. “And you can’t rehabilitate a right hippocampus that isn’t there. But they’ve taught me compensatory skills. The most classic one was I couldn’t remember my zip code. So I came up with a word, ‘neon tube.’ N for a nine, e for eight, o for zero, n for nine and t for tube. And that’s how I have to remember stuff if it’s something I really want to remember.”

Paul credits the VA hospital in Seattle and the eight-week cognitive rehabilitation for helping him to live as close to a normal life as possible.

“We can’t say enough good about them,” Trisha said.

In addition to various rehabs, psychological and emotional support, the Veteran’s Administration also helps provide things like a talking computer to help his quality of life.

Back to basics

According to Paul, when he went to rehab he was asked for a bio.

“I used to run track in high school and college,” Paul said. “I was good enough to get a scholarship to college. I excelled at it.”

“But I couldn’t stand after the operation,” Paul said. “Running was the last thing I wanted to think about.”

After physical therapy began to rebuild Paul’s sense of balance, coupled with glasses that helped correct a midline shift to the left in his vision, Paul said he soon found himself able to become more mobile.

“Now that was helping me to walk and go to the store,” he said. “Then I went on a kayaking trip, again through the VA. And they just kept saying, 'Maybe you should try running. They just kept encouraging me because of my progress.”

After inspiration struck Paul, courtesy of a running coach from Colorado who works exclusively with blind athletes, the VA connected Paul with the Challenge Athlete Foundation (CAF).

The organization, which helps veterans, firefighters and law enforcement members participate in physical activity, financed his trip to Utah and Hawaii.

“I wouldn’t have been able to compete in these meets because of the money,” he said.

First Paul competed in the half-mile at the Huntsman World Senior Games conducted annually in St. George, Utah.

Toward the end of the race, Paul fell. Encouraged by the support of the crowd, however, he finished the race.

“I was disappointed with Utah,” Paul said. “But I only had six weeks to train. I walked away disappointed but not discouraged. I did manage to run three-fourths of a good race.”

With the help of CAF, Paul decided to compete in the Hawaii Senior Games, bringing himself full circle and back to a core part of who he used to be. And who he is now.

“It’s more important to do this than I thought it would be,” Paul said. “But as I started competing, it was still a challenge. Breaking a five-minute mile now is like breaking a four-minute mile when I was a kid.”

For Paul and Trisha, who have been married for 41 years, it’s all about staying positive and enjoying every day they have together.

“A big component of Paul’s illness is the emotional side of it,” Trisha said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s epilepsy or cancer or whatever. That part of your life takes a toll on you just to function and get up every morning and stay positive.”

“I had real problems at the beginning,” Paul added. “If it wasn’t for that cognitive class and my beautiful, wonderful, 24-hour caretaker (Trisha), I don’t know where I’d be.”

Contact Auburn Reporter Sports Reporter Shawn Skager at sskager@auburn-reporter.com or (253) 833-0218, ext. 5054.

Comment on this story.

News Blogroll

• Auburn Skies
  Auburn Reporter editor Mark Klaas discusses all things Auburn, including comings and goings, local issues and community efforts

Related Stories

• Author shows heart, perseverance
• Field of 22 to compete for Miss Auburn crown
• Auburn dynamo finishes strong in quad series racing
• Auburn youth compete, advance in Pitch, Hit and Run
• Auburn's music store man stays in harmony with customers
• Auburn police arrest ill-tempered human barricade | blotter
• 4 Auburn-area wrestlers to compete in NCAA championships March 17-18

Trending Stories, February 7 - February 14

Auburn Reporter

Western Washington