For Whom The Bell Tolls

I’ve been in two minds as to whether I should post this blob. I don’t want AGA just to become a litany of personal mishaps. I want to talk to larger set of topics than what would normally be housed in the diary of a sixteen-year-old girl. But, I also know that misery loves company and we all quietly revel in the misfortunes and failures of good friends, so this one goes out to all those who want to hear about another one of my sterling efforts. (Oh, and as they do say, “Write what you know.”)

I have an informal and mutually satisfying competition going on with Pink Patent Mary Janes. She tells the story of watching a bug fly into her own eye, I sympathise and escalate – on a long bike ride in the summer heat, far from home, I poured my entire drink bottle into my own eye to try and wash the insect out. Bug still in eye and no water in drink bottle.

I mention the time I tried to rip off the top of my ear on the corner of a car door, she shows me scars on her ear where she’s done it, adding that it bled on an expensive dress.

We also like to break up our lightly amusing stories of misadventure with some real doozies that we don’t actually laugh at. Broken ribs (me) and busted anterior cruciate ligaments (her) are just not funny. In people you know, humour is directly related to recovery time. In people you don’t know – it’s geographical distance.

Today’s story sits nicely in between. Odd, scary, but with any luck, not of lasting consequence.

Over the last two days, my face fell off my skull. It was mixed in with a couple of other symptoms so I didn’t immediately twig to what was going on, but when I got up this morning, the left side of my face didn’t work. This is a frightening characteristic to manifest as you plod towards your middle age.

I could get my hands above my head. I could speak. I knew where I was. My left pupil was dilating and contracting when EC shone my Kindle light into it.

But I couldn’t smile, blink, frown, display my teeth, taste, purse my lips or wiggle my left ear. (Normally, I can wiggle my ears and I was trying to map how far the effect was being seen around the globe of my head.) I had lost the crease from my left nostril to the corner of my mouth and I had the appearance of someone who’d got cold feet about botox halfway through their treatment.

Off to the hospital.

Not a stroke.

Bell’s Palsy.

There are a number of annoying things about Bell’s Palsy, not least of which is the amount of tea you spit down your front from not being able to make a proper seal with your lips. But the most annoying thing is not being able to find a dashing eye-patch with a skull and crossbone on it.

The doctors recommend you patch the affected eye, because you lose your blink reflex. This means you don’t protect the eye and you can do all sorts of damage. Picking up the required gear from the chemist this morning, I was bitter to find they only had “flesh coloured” eye-patches.

Firstly, if your flesh is that colour you’ve got bigger problems than the need for an eye-patch. Secondly, I’ve always wanted the excuse to wear an eye-patch and the let-down of not finding a cool one is hard to convey.

It is also not the sort of thing that you should be admitting to – but I’ve got stroke-face for the next couple of weeks and I’m going to be looked at strangely for more than just a daggy desire for a cool eye-patch.