Ludwig is Deaf. He wears hearing aids, has a deaf accent when he speaks (people mistake it for lisp) and is fluent in Koopa Sign. He only uses his hearing aids when he has to be around hearing people or he’s working on music.
Lemmy is autistic and doesn’t mask it. He owns tons of stim toys and his idea of socializing is being in the same room as other people. His biggest meltdown trigger is too much excitement in a short span of time.
Iggy has epilepsy. He takes meds to control focal dyscognitive seizures that sometimes generalize into tonic clonic seizures. His biggest seizure triggers are extreme stress, not sleeping enough and too much activity during the first forty five minutes he’s awake.
Post S3 Billy lives AU except the Mindflayer’s control cause traumatic brain injury which results in Post-Traumatic Epilepsy. (read more about pte here)
some hcs:
He lives with Steve after he wakes up from the coma, bc he couldn’t go back to living with Neil. How the hell would he explain anything? He’s drowning in NDAs that say he can’t talk about any of it, but Steve already knows. Plus big empty house = perfect.
The first seziure doesn’t happen until about 2 weeks after everything’s calmed down. He’s just going about his morning routine, eating breakfast, when he blacks out. The next thing he knows is some random dude in a paramedic uniform asking stupid ass questions like “What’s his name” and “Who’s the president”. He’a able to answer most of them, but they still take him to the hospital.
Cue four weeks of various MRIs and EEGs (who knew there was a 48-hour EEG where he had to take home a weird looking tv thing?) He’s diagnosed with PTE and put on a new anticonvulsant.
Steve becomes UNBEARABLE after his diagnosis. Any sudden noises Billy makes result in a frantic and terrified Steve barging in and asking if he’s okay (no matter where Billy is, including the bathroom).
They learn about absence seziures and wham. Suddenly any time Billy spaces out thinking about something, whether it’s a car problem he’s trying to fix or disassociating after a nightmare, Steve instantly thinks he’s having a seizure and yelling at Billy.
Eventually they come to an understanding, Billy acknowledging that it’s Steve’s way of expressing his care, while Steve learns to calm his reactions to just a verbal confirmation.
The most embarrassing moment of Billy’s life is the first time he has a seizure in front of the kids. He’s worried he’s traumatised the poor kids who’ve already gone through so much. Until Dustin makes a stupid joke and everyone laughs it off.
He never really goes into remission, but he learns what will push him over the edge. No weed (he’s a little sad, but he finds he doesn’t need the escape as much now that Neil isn’t there). He gets sleep and eats regularly. Absolutely NO flashing lights (even slower ones tend to give him at least a migraine). Diligently takes his meds everyday. He’s never 100% seziure free, but the time between them grows until it’s been two years between them.
It's time for me to honor my url and give you my epileptic Zuko headcanons aka me projecting into Zuko not for the first nor the last time since @haikyuupaladin (very easily) convinced me that Zuko has epilepsy
The thing is, seizures are basically your brain sending the wrong electric signals to your body, which results in every firebender being at risk of seizures if they don't control their abilities properly, even if not everyone ends up having them, even less actually developing epilepsy
But I like to project onto Zuko so he's epileptic now
The first couple of times he bends anything, nobody notices, not even himself, because he was having absence seizures (a good example of how these work is when people stop talking mid sentence, look into space while doing nothing, then start talking again as if nothing had happened. The person in question doesn't know it happened), which everyone dismissed as him being distracted or daydreaming
He goes a couple years not noticing he's having seizures, and they start to be more and more uncommon once he starts to get a grasp of firebending in general
He's actually a pretty good bender, he's just not as good as Azula because Azula's body doesn't need to be silently bending seizures away (which is also the reason he seems to be unable to bend lightning, because his body is already busy keeping him away from seizures, which reduces the energy he can use to bend external things)
Everything is fine, until his mother is gone and the stress rises in ways he had never experienced before
Not-so-fun fact: stress is one of the most effective seizure triggers. So suddenly Zuko is not only having absence seizures, but he's also having myoclonics (these ones can be summarized as sudden jerks of the limbs) which are... specially unfortunate when you have the bitchlord as a father
Because Ozai already didn’t like Zuko, and now Zuko is accidentally spilling food and drinks in front of people, and Ozai is sure he's doing it in purpose to make him look bad
If it wasn't clear, he's not, but Ozai sucks
Now, as I'm projecting, I'm going to say Zuko's seizures are also triggered by strong emotions, you know, the only kind of emotions he seems to have
So things only get worse after he's banished :)
Seizures of all kinds become a daily thing, that is, until Iroh catches on what's going on and explains to him what epilepsy is
It doesn't make Zuko less angry at life, but at least he's now more open to follow Iroh's breathing exercises and accept to sleep a little more (still not well, but a little more than usual)
His seizures start to become more and more spaced out with time, especially while they are living in Ba Sing Se, ans even more so after the whole being at war with himself thing
After he leaves Ba Sing Se and guilt is creeping in, he starts to get auras (it's this weird thing one gets before having a seizure, it's hard to explain), but at this point he has learnt so much he is able to fight seizures before they happen
He still has a big one after the day of the black sun because confronting your abusive father takes a tool on you, and this leads to him not remembering very well what happened. One moment he was confronting him and the next he was being licked by Appa
Whom, by the way, is really good to have around after a seizure, because he's super soft and one wants to lay on something soft after your body decides to act without your consent
After his visit to the sun warriors, his seizures start to be the most spaced out the have ever been, it’s almost like he didn’t have epilepsy at all (almost, he still has war stress). Turns out learning a better way to firebend is like getting the right medication
The dragons also tell him they have epilepsy too and therefore every epileptic person is blessed by them, sorry not sorry, I don't make the rules, I am now blessed by dragons
The idea of bloodbending is specially terrifying for him because he knows firsthand how bad it feels to have your body acting without your permission, but at least seizures aren't controlled by anyone at all
Yeah, he's 100% on board with making bloodbending illegal
Back to epilepsy, the rest of the gaang only finds out about it because Aang spaced out in front of Zuko and, naturally, he jumped to conclusions and got that weird kind of excitement you get when you find someone who also has epilepsy (with a side of “if even the avatar can’t avoid epilepsy, then maybe I’m not so disgraceful!”)
Aang was just daydreaming tho
That doesn't stop everyone from asking about his previous rambling about epilepsy and giving him a stern talk about how he’s not disgraceful
He and Toph start the disabled rich kids club just because they can (even though Zuko still feels kinda weird about thinking of himself as disabled, but he’ll get over it)
Toph promises to kill anyone who tries to put stuff in Zuko’s mouth during a seizure (seriously people, we’re not going to swallow our tongues, the whole wallet in your mouth only helps to break jaws)
Zuko has never had a tonic clonic (the kind of seizure most people think about when they hear the word seizure), but he’s not going to deny Toph the pleasure of planning murder
Everything’s cool until he receives Azula’s lightning and he’s having almost daily seizures... again!
The assassination attempts aren’t helping
It eventually gets better again tho
So much better he starts to manage to go several months seizure free and, eventually, years
By the time Izumi is born, he has been seizure free for five years, hooray!
Toph is kinda bummed she won’t get to make people swallow their own wallets tho
Except Zuko is not the only epileptic person in the world, so she does end up getting the chance to do it and now everyone in the Avatar universe knows better than to put wallets in people’s mouths
And when movers get invented nobody even thinks of using strobes, Toph defeated evil before it started, all hail Toph, the end
Spock has unusual staring spells once in awhile. His eyes go out of focus and he blinks rapidly, and then he comes back to himself as if nothing strange occurred. He knows this is happening, it’s like reality gets distant and he senses what everyone around him is thinking with no filter or ability to make it stop.
Nobody notices for years because he can talk and move while it’s happening and he’s really good at hiding it. Then a few occurrences bring it to light.
One day, a Betazoid ambassador has a a series of atonic seizures when he sits down next to Spock. He’s taken away and examined and nothing is amiss with his brain at all. It’s passed off as a fluke occurrence.
Seven years later, Spock has one of these episodes in the turbolift with Kirk. Naturally Kirk puts a hand on Spock’s shoulder to get his attention. He hears a weird screaming in his mind that sounds like Spock shouting at him to not touch him, and down he goes in a tonic clonic.
McCoy gets Kirk situated and pretty much orders Spock to get a full physical evaluation, which Spock does because he just saw the man he loves have a violent seizure and sort of suspects why. He’s the one who volunteers the odd symptoms he experienced all his life and concludes logically that whatever affects him must affect whoever is near him or touches him during an episode.
It turns out Spock has a rare form of Vulcan epilepsy that affects the telepathic areas of his brain. The Betazoid seized because he was a highly sensitive empath / telepath, but Kirk went down because he touched Spock and the seizure treated it like a mind meld. The sudden disruption in brain waves causes sensitive telepaths and anyone who touches him to have a seizure themselves.
Annnnd it turns out these seizures cluster more every seven years, right as he’s about to go into pon farr, so his main trigger is hormone / brain chemistry changes.
McCoy synthesizes medication for Spock to take and schedules him for another brain scan in a month to see how it works.
Btw I’m aware this tiptoes the stereotype of people fearing someone with epilepsy like it’s contagious, so I just want to state that Spock’s seizures did not cause other people to develop epilepsy too, all they did was disrupt brain function.
This is why I’m putting it out so someone with epilepsy can play with it. 👍🏻
