My sister was on her way over that Saturday, fourth of July weekend, with her family and our mom. It was a perfect day, not as oppressively humid as it had been, and at first I thought I was just having a bad allergy day. My right eye kept bothering me. It was leaking and running and tearing up to the point of frustration. Finally, I just took out my contact lenses and threw on my glasses. We ate, drank and had fun and when my family left, I put together a small supper of leftovers for Robert and the girls. I started getting a bad headache behind my right eye. Then it became a full-blown migraine. Still not unusual. They come on now and then. I’ve been getting them for a while. I’d take my migraine medication before bed and I’d be fine for all we had going on in the next few days. As we ate, I realized that the right side of my tongue was numb. I went through the files of my brain to find a food I may have consumed that day that could have caused this. My sister had brought over macaroni salad, but there wasn’t anything different in it than usual. We also had barbequed chicken. No worries there. Fresh veggies with dip, no peas, or anything like that. I couldn’t figure it out. I don’t have too many food allergies but I have a couple of attacks a year because inevitably those foods are in something I’ve eaten when I wasn’t aware it lurked in there somewhere. Like when my in-laws bake at the holidays, they put a lot of walnuts in everything, so I’m very careful to ask first or avoid altogether. My husband’s whole family can really bake like masters but I swear they’ve been trying to kill me for years and they keep saying they “forgot” I have allergies. They always wonder why I avoid the desserts, too. No, it’s not a diet. I went to bed early that night, looking forward to the parties and fireworks that were to follow in the next two days of this long weekend. I didn’t feel weird until I tried to eat breakfast the next day. I couldn’t control the right side of my mouth and my lips felt numb. My eye was still very irritated and I was worried about what might be going on. This wasn’t like any of my other allergy attacks. But I had heard of some people getting numbness in their face during a bad migraine, so I continued on with our day. “Mommy, when you smile, only one side of your face goes up,” Violet said to me after breakfast. I went into the bathroom where we watched my face react normally on one side, and just droop on the other. “Hon, come here!” I yelled. As I stood in front of the bathroom sink trying over and over to move my face normally, I was struck with the memory of my mom calling to my dad as she caught sight of my hands when we first found out I have arthritis. I shuddered, peering into the mirror, willing my face to move. “What’s going on?” My husband came up from the cellar, sweating and panting. He’s a lot like my dad sometimes. It was getting very hot outside, I could tell, but our downstairs stayed as cool as a cave for most of the day. “Look,” I directed him, and his expression immediately turned to concern after he saw my face’s lack of reaction. “I can’t move the right side of my entire face,” I tried to say, but my f’s did not take shape and fell flat against my lips. “My face hurts. Bad,” I added. “Can you move your arms and legs on that side?” He asked. “Yeah, no problem. Do you think this is caused by my migraine?” I knew he was thinking stroke, especially since my dad was so young when he had one. But I’d seen first hand what a stroke was, and I was pretty sure this wasn’t one. I was still convinced I was having weird migraine symptoms. Plus, I didn’t smoke two packs of Camels Unfiltered every day for forty years the way my dad did. “I don’t’ know,” he said. I sat down at the island in the kitchen, rubbing my right eye. “This is still really bothering me.” “All right,” Robert said. He was about to take action. This is what he did. “Take something for your head and go lay down. I’m going to set up the tent, even though it looks like rain. If we stay home from the Milford party then I’m going to pick up some ice cream and sundae stuff for the girls.” My daughters were expecting their friends over for a sleepover in our tent in the backyard. We were supposed to go to a cookout first, then the fireworks in Milford but rain threatened and I began to feel worse and worse as the day went on. I sighed. “Okay,” I gave in. I took another migraine pill and headed to bed. I slept for two hours. When I woke up, I was groggy and my jaw and cheekbone killed. I tried to take a sip of the water I’d left on my bedside table but my lips would not function. What the heck now? Was all I kept thinking. Why was this happening? Really? Do I deserve this, too? Well, I couldn’t just lay there and feel sorry for myself. I had stuff to do. I got up, the girls’ friends came over, they had fun putting all their stuff into the tent and setting everything up the way they liked it. They played and swam and then we ordered pizza. These girls can eat. I knew my two ate well but I didn’t know too many other kids who could put away as much pizza as Nattie. I liked kids that ate well. Good thing we got three pizzas. Who told me girls don’t eat? They were wrong. Some do. After that we made huge sundaes with cookie dough and moose tracks ice cream, caramel and hot fudge syrup, whipped cream and m&m’s. Yum. But by then I could barely taste anything and I was getting very frustrated at the way everything just seemed to slide down and out the side of my mouth! Unreal. The worst part was the crushing pain in my face. I went to bed early again. The girls were so good, they entertained themselves and because they were outside we didn’t have to tell them to be quiet and go to sleep a million times. Until two in the morning, when I did tell them to settle down. They were still out there whooping and screaming. My poor neighbors. I woke up in more pain than ever. It was fourth of July. I was sure as soon as I got up that I was not going to be able to go to the cookout then fireworks at our friends’ house. There was no point in even trying. The right side of my head was like an explosion. I could barely speak clearly at this point. I knew I had to call the doctor first thing the next morning, so I packed Robert and the girls up for their day, took more medication and went to bed. I tried to watch a movie later, but my eye was so irritated that I ended up just going back to sleep. They came home around eleven thirty. They had fun and looked exhausted, so we all just went to bed. Robert had to work the next day. I was a mess when I finally got up. It was so hot outside and my head was pounding. I called Robert at work to see if there was any way he could get out early. I needed to go to the doctor. He came home after lunch and I got an appointment right away but the doctor wanted me to go straight to the emergency room for a cat scan. I guess they have to cover all their bases, but the doctor said it was pretty clear that I had Bell’s Palsy, an inflammation of the facial nerves. They had to do a full blood workup and also a head scan to be sure it wasn‘t something more serious. I resisted, telling her that I have a $200 co-payment at the emergency room and I’d already just dropped my usual $30 there at her office today. I knew they would not keep me overnight at the hospital, which is the only way to avoid the copay, but the doctor insisted she was calling over there to set it up for me. We piled everyone back up in the car and headed over to Milford Hospital. I dread that place. I have so much painful history there. The drive from my doctor’s office in Franklin to Milford that afternoon was brutally silent. I wonder if the girls were scared? I was too rattled to wonder about it then, or to reassure them. Robert’s face was a stone, his lips a hard line, pressed together as if he was trying to keep something inside. I didn’t have to wait long. The place was dead, plus when your doctor calls ahead you get right in most of the time. They led me into the ER and instructed me to lay down on a stretcher in the hallway, right in front of the nurses station. Under the glare of bright lights and all the buzzers going off, I waited patiently while nurses took my blood pressure and monitored my symptoms. An hour and a half later, the resident on call, “Sonny,” looked in my mouth, my ears, perceived my facial paralysis, and determined that I could have something for the pain. He prescribed percocet, which I hate with a passion, but I took it and tried to close my eye. “Mom, your eye’s not closed,” Nat said casually, barely looking up from her iPod Touch. I tried to look at her, my left eye rolling around and my right barely moving. She was tanned and relaxed. My nurse had found the girls some chairs and they were settled in, Nattie on her iPod and Violet, brown eyes big, watched and observed all of the commotion carefully. She wants to be in the medical field, she tells me all the time, maybe a nurse, maybe a doctor. She’s not sure yet. She watched intently as a cute, young girl with a dark ponytail and tight scrubs drew tube after tube of blood from my arm. She almost sprang from the chair to see my nurse tape up my eye and put a patch over it. When the nurse left, Vi patted it with her small hands, and like the little mommy she is, she smoothed over a spot, She smiled slightly. I tried to smile back but I was afraid of what that looked like. A grimace out of the worst horror movie? People drifted down the hallway, not ashamed to stare until they could figure out what was wrong with me. Good luck, I thought. My head continued to ache. An hour later, the doctor came back and told me I didn’t need a CT scan after all. Robert and I exchanged a glance and without speaking we aired all of our frustrations out in that one look. Sonny’d spoken with a neurologist and I have textbook Bell’s Palsy. I would need to see a neurologist within four days (joke: no specialist can take you in less than two weeks, if you are lucky), and a prescription for percocet. I needed to explode. Inside my head, I ranted. What?! You can’t unblock this nerve? Blow this puppy out? Get rid of this paralysis? Come on! I wanted to scream. What a waste. A waste of time and money. We shuffled out of there another hour later, after waiting for the nurse to come back from dinner and prepare for my release. The woman at reception told us she’d bill us for the copay. That was nice of her. I decided to call my rheumatologist the next day. I got an appointment with the neurologist, too, for another two weeks, which does me no good at all right now and I wanted some relief. After an extensive internet research, I found out that steroids are sometimes prescribed to lessen the inflammation but that the prescribing of steroids for this condition varies from year to year. No one can figure out if it helps or not. Well, I didn’t care. I was willing to try everything. By the next day, my rheumatologist had put me on a high dose of prednisone and ordered a CT scan. My test for Lyme disease came back negative, and I will be tested for that again in a few weeks. It’s been a week and a half and although I am significantly better, I am continually frustrated with my eye, the inability to eat, and how difficult and painful talking is after a while. I am at my best in the morning but I still need a lot of rest. I am praying there was no permanent damage to my nerves and that everything heals normally so I can get back to enjoying my summer! Until then, have a drink on me, or I’ll just get it all over myself, anyway!