It was just a few minutes after 2 a.m. when Dennis Fegan awoke with a start. He got up from his bed and went to the laundry room, where he kept a calendar to record his seizures, and made a vertical mark on July 2, 2006. By late morning, when his parents found him and frantically called an ambulance, there were a dozen vertical marks on the date.
Fegan, an imposing 48-year-old veteran of the hardscrabble Texas oil industry, lived in a working-class section of Corpus Christi. When his parents arrived, he staggered out of his bedroom looking dazed then abruptly lost consciousness and fell face first onto the uncarpeted floor. While they waited for the ambulance, he continued to lose and regain consciousness. By the time it arrived, he was covered in bruises, his jeans were wet with urine and he looked half-dead.
