Health

When half your face stops working, you brace for it. You picture the flinch. The kid who points. The cashier who suddenly finds the register very interesting. You figure you’re about to become a leper—ring the bell, unclean, unclean—and you steel yourself for a world that recoils. Then you walk out into that world and discover the truth: nobody notices a damned thing. Strangers See a Ghost I’ve been out. Grocery store, gas station, drive-thru. Slurring, drooping, sipping coffee out of the one corner of my mouth that still takes orders. And the strangers of the world have, to a person, treated me exactly as they always have. ...

I’m not sure exactly when I noticed it. Was it when I was drinking my first cup of coffee and couldn’t quite focus on my phone? Was it when I laughed at something on Threads and felt my face numb like an overactive shot of novacaine? Like I said, I really don’t know, but at some point around 6:30 - 7am on Friday I realized my the left side of my face was frozen. I couldn’t close my left eye–such a simple thing. I couldn’t blink I couldn’t smile. My face drooped. ...

Poor sleep last night. So the Daylight Savings Time switch was this weekend, so everyone felt fully capable of staying up until midnight watching movies. This weekend we watched Raya and the Last Dragon on Friday, the final episode of Agent Carter and the first in the Hobbit trilogy on Sunday. I’m uneasy. I have my second (well, final) cataract surgery on Wednesday–as luck would have it St. Patrick’s Day. I went to bed before Whitney and Maria and when they went to bed I woke up with my mind swimming from flashbacks from the last cataract surgery: The immense anxiety. The claustrophobia of being draped with just your eye poking out. The general fear of the smells of a surgical center. ...