A Blink

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.