Pirate!!!

Ok, so I have some weird thing going on. It started out as something scary, but it seems to be something that I will just have to live with for a few weeks or months and then it will just get better. It all stems back to all the coldsores that I have always gotten all my life! So, my symptoms started last week. Last Wednesday half of my tongue went numb. I thought it was kind of weird, but I thought maybe I had burned my mouth even though I could not remember doing so. It was a bit annoying because I could not taste ANYTHING on the right side of my mouth. On Friday, it was worse. I felt like I had just been to the dentist. The right side of my tongue was numb still, plus my right cheek. Also, my right eye was twitching ALL day. I still thought that I was just maybe having some weird allergic reaction until I went to drink something and it spilled out of my mouth....really weird. I went into the bathroom to look at my face. Nothing to different. I smiled. But only half of my face smiled. I looked at my eye. It was bright red and twitching. I went to bed thinking that that was really weird, but maybe I was just tired. Well, I would get more tired, because my right eye would not shut, so I could not sleep. By the time morning came, My eye looked awful and there was no way that anything on my right side of my face would even move. It was paralyzed. Then I got really worried. I called a nurse on my insurance card and she told me to get to the ER immediately in case I was having a stroke. We live right next to the medical district in Houston which is world renowned, so we didn't even know where to start at which hospital to go to, there are literally hundreds!!! We ended up going to the one that looked the nicest :) Turns out it was one of the #1 stroke hospitals in the world right now!! It was great I walked into the ER, checked in and before I could sit down they called me in (we were in and out of the ER in an hour on Saturday, when does that happen?) They took me in and did all the test and reported that I have Bells Palsy. Apparently, it acts like a stroke in some ways, but it is not and they have these tests to make sure. They don't know for sure, but they think it is caused by ther herpes virus. The virus inflammes and where the nerve to your face goes through a little nerve in the back of your skull there is no room for it so you don't get any nerve connections to that side of your face (whichever side is inflammed). This can last from 3 weeks to 6 months. So there main concern is the fact that my eye doesn't blink, it can get ulcers from drying out. So, thus I am now a pirate. I may look a little funny, too, but at least it is not permanent. The Doctors put me on a steroid to help the inflammation and also the coldsore medicine that I usually take for my coldsores. I don't have any coldsores right now, but it is just the virus inside of my body flaring up, kind of weird. I don't have any pain, which is good. So, hopefully I will look normal in a few weeks!!!