Went to the doctor this morning for a look at the Bell's Palsy. Seems to be recovering still; I can move my eyebrow pretty well, and this morning I could close my right eye by itself for the first time since this started. At this point we just have to hang around and see how things go, but it's looking good for the future. Might be another month or two before we get to whatever point we're going to get to, though.

In celebration, let me do a little meme. I'm sure you've all seen the music meme where you guess which song and artist a particular line came from, especially since I do it all the time. I'm going to do a bit of a variation on it. When I quit IRC, I habitually quote a song lyric in my /quit message (at least the first time I leave IRC in a given day). So rather than mine iTunes, I'm going to take the last twenty /quit messages out of my logs and use those as the songs. Even the ones that make it really, really obvious which song it is.

Ready? Let's begin.

1. Everywhere people stare / Each and every day / I can see them laugh at me / And I hear them say
2. And every demon wants his pound of flesh / But I like to keep some things to myself / I like to keep my issues strong / It's always darkest before the dawn
3. This dragon had a plaguey hide / Fa-la-lanky-don-dilly / That could the sharpest steel abide / Fa-la-lanky-don-dilly / No sword could enter through her skin / Which vexed the knight and made her grin
4. Come out upon my seas / Curse missed opportunities / Am I / A part of the cure? / Or am I part of the disease? / Singin' / You / Are / You / Are / You / Are
5. She's a Killer Queen / Gunpowder / Gelatine / Dynamite with a laser beam / Guaranteed to blow your mind / Anytiiiiiiiiiime
6. I like to play the drums / I think I'm getting good, but I can handle criticism / I'll show you what I know / And you can tell me if you think I'm getting better on the drums
7. Season's greetings in our so~ouls (yummy Fruity Pebbles in our bowls)
8. You might hear some reindeer on your rooftop / Or Jack Frost at your windowsill / But if someone's climbing down your chimney / You better grab your gun and shoot to kill
9. Ying tong ying tong ying tong ying tong ying tong iddle I po
10. Hasof zroa kodshekha, vekarev ketz hayeshu'a / Nkom nikmat dam avadeikha me'uma haresha'a / Ki arkha hasha'a, ve'ein ketz limei hara'a
11. I need your grace / To remind me / To find my own
12. There is a party / Everyone is there / Everyone will leave / At exactly the same time / When this party's over / It will start again / It will not be any different / It will be exactly the same
13. I'm just an animal looking for a home / Share the same space for a minute or two
14. And now you're under control (now you do what they told ya)
15. A singer in a smokey room / A smell of wine and cheap perfume / For a smile they can share the night / It goes on and on and on and on
16. When the last days come / We shall see visions / More vivid than sunsets / Brighter than stars
17. Think of bombs / We're poised on the edge of disaster / Whether it's right or it's wrong / We opened the window / Played some Nintendo / Sang a few bars of some pretty old song
18. Dead eyes / Dead eyes / And are you just like me?
19. I fear that I'm ordinary / Just like everyone / To lie here and die among the sorrows / Adrift among the days
20. Bang, bang! Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon her head / Bang, bang! Maxwell's silver hammer made sure she was dead

There you go. Song and artist, one point each. Looking them up with a search engine is, naturally, cheating. Comments are screened so people can guess freely. On the one where the "artist" is not obvious (there is one), I'll accept a general note about where it came from.

I already posted about this on Twitter (and thereby Facebook), but I know some of you guys don't read those, plus I wanted to get all the details down. And then I put it off, but I need to stop doing that.

Okay. Last Tuesday I had an earache. The kids have had a cold so I figured I was getting that. Wednesday it was worse, and in the evening my tongue felt funny, like it had a coat on it. Thursday morning, when I woke up, the right side of my face felt sluggish and thick. I was having trouble doing anything with it. I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until my wife got home from her morning dentist's appointment and I tried to talk to her about it; I sounded like mushmouth because I couldn't get the right side of my mouth to move properly.

We called the doctor's office around noon, but nobody would be available until four. I didn't want to wait that long, so we went to the ER. After the usual poking and prodding I got my diagnosis: Bell's Palsy. What this means, in summary, is that some swelling tissue on the side of my head is impinging on my facial nerve, causing paralysis of the side of my face. (The right side, in my case.) This can be caused by a number of things, but sometimes it just happens and the mechanism is not well understood.

The ER doc prescribed me Amoxicillin in case I had a bacterial ear infection that was causing the swelling, and Valtrex, an anti-Herpes drug, for no particular reason. Apparently this is often done in these cases, although it hasn't been shown to have any real effects. I'm taking it anyway because if there's even a chance it will work I'm willing to try it, and two doctors and a pharmacist have assured me it's relatively harmless, and I know and trust two of those people.

The next morning the paralysis was actually a bit worse, so my primary care doctor added on a corticosteroid called Prednisone (to reduce the swelling - this is noted online as being the most effective treatment for this condition) and Prilosec (to combat stomach issues caused by same). She did this, bless her heart, from her vacation in Florida after taking a call from us on her cell, and told us we should call her back if anything got worse.

So that's what's up with me right now. Half my face doesn't work. The prognosis is basically unknown. A lot of cases of this go away (up to 85%), but upon digging into it it turns out that "go away" means that some of the functionality comes back. It might not be 100%, but at this point I'd take it. Some people take a long time to recover; one of my co-workers had it in high school for two months. Some people never do; Jean Chretien, former prime minister of Canada, lost the use of the left side of his face permanently. (A good line from that Wikipedia entry: he's "One politician who didn't talk out of both sides of his mouth".) So I'm just taking my various pills and hoping for the best right now. My wife has been an enormous help through all this, I have to say, both emotionally and in terms of the actual physical details. I don't know how I would be dealing with this without her.

I'm going to go into a bit more detail now, but I'll put it behind a cut for those of you who don't want to get into it, since it might be a bit more information than you wanted.

( Read more... )

And that's it. There's nothing to be done about it that we aren't doing already, so it's just a matter of trying to keep it together and seeing what happens. How's everyone else doing?

So, I am not (at least not yet) moving my normal journal over here. I still haven't come up with a good idea as to what I want to do with this space. What do you all think I ought to do with it?