They say life can
change in the blink of an eye.
On a Tuesday
morning you can spoon-feed your toddler oatmeal while listening to Al Roker rattle
on about the horrific weather out east. You
can decide to take a bite. You can feel
it slip out of the corner of your mouth, down your chin and fall into a goopy
mess on your pajama pants. You can pause
for a moment, mentally trying to make sense how you managed to get food all
over yourself as your eye spasms and your cheek goes numb. And you can go to the mirror and realize you
cannot move the entire left side of your face.
You can look on in horror at your reflection - your crooked attempt at a
grin, your drooping nose, and the missing creases of your face. You can stare as your right eye twitches furiously,
no longer in sync with its partner. Just an eerie, vacant, motionless half of a
face. Here is what I know. Life doesn’t always change with the blink of
an eye. Sometimes a blink never
comes.
I am on day 33 of Bell’s
palsy. Bell’s palsy – a facial paralysis resulting from a dysfunction of the
cranial nerve VII. Usually
temporary. Usually. Everyone has told
me to write about my experience, but frankly it is has been difficult to put
into words. I considered going the
comical route – of posting photos on Facebook of me sporting zany eye patches
with mermaids and peace signs while out dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant
or in the audience at Book of Mormon. I contemplated relaying in humorous detail how
in those first few minutes of onset, while in utter terror that I was having a
stroke and about to die, I thought NOT of 911 but of Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts as Shelby, lying unconscious in the final scenes of Steel Magnolias with her one-year-old
screeching on the floor beside her and the pasta water boiling over on the
stove. Convinced this was my same fate,
I scanned the kitchen to confirm I wasn’t cooking anything at seven in the
morning and for a brief moment wondered where I could hide so my daughter wouldn’t
have to watch me die. Which, in
retrospect, actually doesn’t sound very humorous.
After that, I figured
that since I had contracted this weird, 1-in-40,000-people-worldwide-malady, I
had earned the right to compose my most self-indulgent mass email yet. A tale of pity (oh-woe-is-me), a real doozie of wallowing injustice and a shameless
ploy to get friends and family to send me chicken casseroles and condolence
cards. But, there is this darn thing
called perspective. Someone somewhere
knows somebody who invariably is going through worse stuff than you. And after a few of those stories, I instantly
felt like an ass for complaining.
The truth is that
this has not been an easy road. From the
first ten days, doped up on so many steroids that I simply wanted to curl into
a beanbag of sobs, to the four-week checkup when my neurologist conveyed in
that flat medical tone that he was “concerned” for my prognosis given the lack
of improvement and that I should consider the possibility that I may not
experience full recovery. The bottom line
is I don’t want “this” to be my “thing”.
My cause. My life
before and life after. I want it to
be a blip on the radar. This crazy scare
that happened to me one morning and the next minute was gone. The accident you just avoided on an icy
road. The fall you almost took down the
stairs. It gets your heart racing, makes
you sweat, and sinks your stomach, but it doesn’t change your life.
Admittedly, I have
gleaned both some valuable and some otherwise useless lessons from all of this.
For one, I have mastered the awkward “art”
of taping down my eyelid so that my cornea doesn’t shrivel up like a Sunsweet
prune. And, it is an art - technique,
precision, patience and an exhaustive amount of trial and error. With bottles of eye drops and ointment
littering the house, I have taught my 15 month-old to say “Mama Boo-boo” when
she points at my face which I think is pretty impressive considering it is
multi-syllabic AND a phrase. I am also
fully convinced that Ambien is a wonder drug. It is the only reprieve from those dreaded
nights. When you are laying there with
your left eye half-open under the tape, with no distractions against the nerve pain
throbbing in your mastoid bone, which as a matter of fact, makes you even more
pissed off that you now know what the heck a mastoid is.
On a more solemn
level, I have gotten a glimpse into the life of someone who doesn’t quite fit
the mold. Vanity is not something I had given much
thought to prior to this. You can’t be
too preoccupied with your appearance if you work from home and consider jeans
to be dressing up. Still, stepping out
in public while talking out of one side of your mouth with a patch on your eye
takes a little more gumption than a trip to Whole Foods in flannels and a
ponytail. You notice people trying not
to stare, wondering what happened, and not knowing where to look when they ask
you, “Credit or Debit?” You taste
their pity. You swallow your own
awkwardness. You attempt to maintain
your dignity, surging with the need to explain, but realizing, “What’s the point?”. I
don’t want to pretend I fully understand what it would be like to be in a
wheelchair or have a prosthetic limb or live with severe scars, but I think now
I can relate to being different – to having the uncanny experience of being simultaneously
invisible and conspicuous.
Without question I
have begun to comprehend, more than ever, how important the gift of health
is. It is what we idly toast to on New
Year’s Eve and scribble wishes for in our Christmas cards and spend ten minutes
appreciating after we hear someone collapsed on the tennis courts at
fifty-five. The body is a complex
machine with a myriad of miraculous moving parts and I don’t think I fully
grasped the delicate dance of it all before my cranial nerve VII took a misstep.
And finally, there
is my spouse. Through all this I have a
renewed appreciation for the man who stood beside me on that ridge overlooking
Napa valley three years ago and along with five other sequential “I do’s” promised to love me in sickness and in
health. Many times, he has taken the
brunt of my anger and sorrow, but he has never faltered from staying positive,
giving me hope and reassuring me that he loves me even if I am sporting a
pirate patch. I knew I got one of the
good ones, but to see it in practice truly solidifies that I am blessed.
And so, we plod
on. My mom always reminded my siblings
and me growing up that there is no perfect life. You can peer down the block and assume, but every
house has a story. Every person is tested. I read tidbits from strangers online about
how recovery came slowly, after three months, after six months. How they just learned to suck from a straw
again after a year. How after 45 days
they could finally close their eye. I
guess that is what keeps me buoyant. A
few signs of progress. A little twitch
of my upper lip here and a half-centimeter more on my eyebrow raise there. In the meantime, life goes on. Dinner parties, work trips, dirty diapers,
and a modest investment in eye lubrication companies. And maybe some morning, some innocuous morning
while I am feeding my daughter apple cinnamon oatmeal and the sun is streaming
through the front window, just maybe, there will be a blink. And
that would be life-changing.
