My Lopsided Smile
Well, it's another slow day at work today, so I have been spending a lot of time reading through other people's blogs. I'll probably have to keep this post short, as I sliced one of my fingers open yesterday on a file here in the office and I now have a huge bandage on it which is making it difficult to type. Someone should try to market a brand of files with dull edges that don't slice your fingertips open so easily. I'd go out of my way to buy them.I don't have too much to write about at the moment, so I thought I would tell a story about something that happened to me. I was just looking at a fairly recent picture of me, and I noticed that my smile is still a little bit lopsided. Most people wouldn't notice, but anytime I see my picture I can tell. If you were to cut my face down the middle, and you looked at either side separately, you would see that one half would be bright and smiling, and the other half would have a blank, muted expression. It's not as noticeable as it was a few years ago, but it's still there.
It happened when I was studying in London for a semester in the spring of 1998. I was at the Barbican Theater watching a production of Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hamlet has always been one of my favorites from Shakespeare, but I was annoyed because I didn't know beforehand that it was a modernized version of it, set in the first half of the 20th century with a jazz / big band theme. I really hate Shakespeare plays set in modern times. Of all of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet was the one I most wanted to see with classic staging and costuming, but alas, it was not to be.
They were using a smoke machine during the play, and the whole theater was filled with fog from it. As I watched the play, my right eye started twitching from being dry and getting irritated by the fog. As the show went on, it seemed to get worse. I wasn't feeling right, so when the play ended I quickly left my friends behind and got to the tube as quickly as possible to go home. On the train ride back, my eye was still twitching, and when I went to take a sip of bottled water I drooled all over myself. I knew something wasn't right, and I honestly felt like I was about to turn into a werewolf or something.
By the time I got home, I started freaking out because the whole right side of my face was paralyzed. I couldn't blink my right eye, raise my right brow, or crack even the slightest smile with the right side of my mouth. I couldn't believe it was happening, and I thought if I went to bed I would wake up and everything would be fine. Well, it wasn't. I woke up the next day and half of my face was still frozen. I was terrified, and being in a foreign country, I didn't know what to do.
It probably would have made sense to go directly to a doctor, but I wasn't thinking clearly. I went to a bookstore on Tottenham Court Road and began to sift through textbooks for neurology students. After a couple of hours, I found a description for a condition called Bell's Palsey, and I knew that was what I had. (This was before the birth of Google, mind you, and at that point I wasn't familiar enough with the internet to find it anyways.)
They don't know for sure what causes it, but it is believed to be a secondary effect from a virus or bacterial infection. I had a really bad sinus infection just prior to it happening, so it's likely that was the cause of it. I've also speculated that it may have been from eating some British beef from a mad cow, or perhaps from the absinthe that I drank while I was in Spain for a weeklong vacation. I'll never know for sure.
Basically, half of my face was frozen for about three months. I felt like the character Two Face from the Batman comics. I couldn't blink that eyelid, so I had to keep using drops to keep it from drying out. Also, the right side of my mouth would droop, so it affected my speech as well. It was an utter nightmare.
I saw a couple of English doctors who I would call "quacks," but there was nothing they could do. There is no treatment for it, other than facial massages and exercises to strengthen the muscles in the face once movement returns. After not being used for so long, the muscles in the right side of my face atrophied. It went away after a couple of months but it took years before the right side of my face was even close to being fully symmetrical with the left side.
The lopsidedness is still there today, to a much lesser degree. It's not very noticeable anymore to anyone except myself. Every time I see of picture of myself I can still see it though.
Okay, that's it for now. This wasn't as short as I planned, but I do tend to be wordy. I may return later with a political rant.
posted by Skrambled Egghead Reborn @ 2:23 PM
<< Home