Playing Through

Imagine waiting for an earthquake, only the earthquake is inside you.

It sits quietly in the corner of your brain, and sits, and sits, and maybe it strikes tomorrow, and maybe it strikes next week, and maybe it never strikes.

You lie on your back and pray into the empty darkness for that last possibility, but you know how it works. The earthquake probably will strike again, because after sitting quietly for five years, it struck again in December.

All that time sleeping, it woke up angry. It knocked you on the floor of your bathroom, kicked your feet wildly enough to leave marks on the wall, smeared your face back and forth in your blood.

After you regained consciousness and crawled to a phone to call home--”Mom,” you sobbed, and she knew--you climbed into bed and looked into that empty darkness again.

And you thought, now what?

Maybe your medicine had stopped working. Maybe your luck had run out.

The earthquake known as epilepsy was back, sitting there again, sitting, sitting, and what do you do?

Do you hide? Do you run? Do you cover your head with your hands and wait just as it waits?

Not Aimee Copp.

She did what she always does.

She flew.

She showed up at practice with her USC women’s basketball teammates like always, bruised head, fat lip, lots of stares, and she played.

She ran the floor, leaped to the rim, fought for the ball, and has been doing it ever since.

Basketball is her release. Basketball is her revenge.

“In basketball,” Aimee Copp says, “I am free.”

She recently suffered a reaction to new medication that caused her to lean trembling against the bleachers while teammates watched in horror.

She bit her lower lip and continued.

Her mind sometimes goes blank for five seconds. The medication sometimes makes her so woozy she must sit down.

She bites her lower lip and continues.

If and when a seizure strikes again, junior forward Aimee Copp has made a decision.

Earthquakes cannot hurt her, because she will be flying.

This was not supposed to be a story about a middle, but an ending. This was supposed to be about how Aimee Copp, after spending most of her high school years on the sidelines dealing with epilepsy, had finally whipped it to become a basketball star.

“I thought it was over,” she says quietly.

This was supposed to be about how, while remaining seizure free for nearly five years beginning with senior season at Fullerton High, she had worked eight hours a day to become one of the top junior college players in the country.

She had picked her dream university, USC, over 30 other schools. She was a tough 6-foot-1 junior who could dominate at center or forward. She was scheduled to be eligible at the end of December.

The comeback story was finished.

Then a couple of weeks before her first game, she came home from shopping, put away some groceries, walked into the bathroom, and blacked out.

The next thing she remembers, she was lying on the bathroom floor, hyperventilating, unable to walk for more than 10 minutes because of spasms occurring in seemingly every muscle in her body.

Raising her head, she saw her reflection in a closet mirror. Her face was covered in blood.

The terror was back.

“I crawled into bed and started thinking a million things,” she says. “Mostly, it was like, why me? I mean, I thought I had paid my dues.”

Two months later, sitting in the spotless living room of her campus apartment earlier this week, she describes how she is still paying them.

Because of the recent seizure, she can no longer legally drive a car--she must remain seizure free for a year to regain her license.

So she moved closer to campus and bought a bike.

Then, last week, somebody stole her bike.

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disease that causes seizures that can sometimes be prevented with drugs. Her doctor figured that perhaps she had grown immune to her current medication and prescribed new drugs.

But sometimes those drugs leave her feeling drowsy or cause her to briefly lose attention. Sometimes they make everything blurry.

While she is experimenting with the right drug and dosage in an effort to gain control of her life again, anything can happen.

The only thing for certain is, in one way, she is going through it alone.

Despite being surrounded by strong parents and an older brother and close friends and sensitive Coach Chris Gobrecht, there is one part of her life she can not discuss with anyone.

Because she has never met another epileptic.

“What I go through,” she says softly, “it’s really unexplainable.”

Yet she has continued to practice and play and improve, advancing from a raw talent to someone about whom Gobrecht says, “She shows moments of having great things to contribute to this team.”

But for how long?

Copp doesn’t know. She tries not to think about it.

She just flies, scoring her two points and grabbing her one rebound in her nine minutes every game with the intensity of a double-double.

“If I start believing that my disease is just the way it is, just the way I’ll end up, then that’s all I’ll do in life . . . just end up,” she says, her wide eyes growing bright. “I don’t want to just end up. I want to do something. I want to have big dreams.”

That word, dream, is still written in grease pencil on the mirror of the bedroom of her Fullerton home.

It has been there since she used it to inspire her transformation at the start of her senior year.

Before that, since having her first seizure in seventh grade, her high school years were, in her words, “terrible.”

Struggling to find the right medicine, she suffered 10-15 seizures a year while losing her hair and suffering incontinence because of the medication.

Once a good student and soccer player, she would sleep 14 hours a day and miss all her classes.

School officials would summon her and demand to know what was wrong. She would break down in tears when they wouldn’t understand.

“The biggest thing about epilepsy is the ignorance,” says her mother, Phyllis.

Through her parents’ persistence, Copp ended up in Loma Linda University Medical Center in the summer after her junior year, subjecting herself to two weeks of observation in hopes of finding the proper medicine.

Confined to her bed with electrodes strapped to her brain with gauze, unable to move more than 10 feet for the entire two weeks, she had three monitored seizures that Dr. Carmel Armon--she calls him her savior--used to figure out the right prescription.

“It was like, my life had begun,” Copp says.

That fall, she played her first high school basketball, even though she could not dribble with her right hand and her father John had to teach her to shoot in the driveway.

The next summer, she spent entire days in gyms, including three hours practicing her dribbling on racquetball courts.

Says Phyllis: “I finally said, ‘Honey, what are you doing?’ ”

Says Aimee: “I told her, ‘Let me go, I only have one chance to be young.’ ”

And so she has grasped that chance, harder in the hard times, so hard now her knuckles are white, absolutely unwilling to let go.

“Sometimes I’m scared, really scared,” she says, biting her lip again. “But I am not going to let fear overcome my life.”

Unexplainable? Not really.

This is the story of a big, powerful, madly malfunctioning brain.

Being whipped by a heart.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address bill.plaschke@latimes.com