the deceptive post-seizure well-being

The Withdrawal's cruelest trick, the false dawn after the seizure: Poor Tony wakes lizardless (the DT-hallucinations gone) and continent and right as rain, and mistakes the treacherous post-seizure euphoria for recovery — a man "risen by will from the ashes of Withdrawal" who is in fact only in the eye of it. The paramedic warns him the feeling is notoriously deceptive and transient; the book lets him strut out into it anyway, because the disease's genius is exactly this counterfeit of turning the corner, the upswing that is really the next descent.