I was planning to work from home last Friday morning. I got out of bed like normal, showered, brushed, dressed, and grabbed a bagel from the pantry downstairs. As I sat at my desk eating my bagel, I noticed my mouth wasn’t working normal. The right side of my lips wouldn’t part wide enough to fit the bagel into my mouth. It was subtle at first. Before I finished eating, I noticed a slight numbness on the right side of my face. That’s weird, I thought.

I tore the bagel apart along the pre-cut slice so I could fit it into my mouth. Once I finished eating, (maybe 5 minutes after noticing the strangeness), I started wondering about what was going on with my face. The numbness was still subtle, but feeling my lips and cheek with my fingers revealed that the muscles weren’t working properly. I wondered if this is what a stroke starts like.

I’m a healthy man. I don’t have any medical or physical problems. I shouldn’t be at risk for a stroke. Wifegrit is a nurse, so I thought I should at least tell her something weird was happenig with me. I went downstairs to the kitchen where she and the boys were having their own breakfast before school. I told her about the numbness and the difficulty with my lips. She pointed out that my right eye was not blinking, and I was talking out the left side of my mouth. Basically, nothing on the right side of my face was moving. I quickly went to a mirror and watched my face. Holy crap! The right side of my face didn’t move no matter what contortions I tried. Smiling, blinking, opening my mouth, everything just moved my left side but not my right.

Wifegrit had the thought of a stroke, too, but she also remembered something called Bell’s palsy that caused paralysis to one side of a person’s face. It was something she vaguely remembered from nursing school, and she also had a coworker who once had the condition. We both decided I needed to immediately go to my doctor and have this checked out.

At the doctor’s office, in the waiting room, I felt physically normal. The numbness had subsided, and my face felt fine. But touching it with my fingers proved that there was still no movement on the right side. My right eye would start to dry, and I’d have to use my fingers to close it for a few moments to relieve the discomfort.

Once in the examination room, with the doctor, the first thing he had me do was raise my eyebrows. My left eyebrow went up, but the right eyebrow didn’t. The doc said that was good. In a stroke, I would still be able to raise both eyebrows. His immediate diagnosis was Bell’s palsy, but he continued to test me to rule out other possibilities. In the end, the BP diagnosis was right. It’s a relief to know you’re not having a stroke, but knowing that your face will be paralyzed for weeks isn’t a relief. It’s hella distressing, in fact.

It’s not a really rare condition, (1 in 60 people will experience it during their life), but I had never heard of it before this. Now, though, I’ve heard of four other stories from people around me: my wife’s coworker, my mom’s friend, a friend’s coworker, and a pharmacist’s roommate. Their conditions all lasted from a couple of weeks to a couple of months.

From the Mayo Clinic:

Bell’s palsy causes sudden weakness in your facial muscles. This makes half of your face appear to droop. Your smile is one-sided, and your eye on that side resists closing.

Bell’s palsy, also known as facial palsy, can occur at any age. The exact cause is unknown, but it’s believed to be the result of swelling and inflammation of the nerve that controls the muscles on one side of your face. It may be a reaction that occurs after a viral infection.

For most people, Bell’s palsy is temporary. Symptoms usually start to improve within a few weeks, with complete recovery in about six months.

The doc prescribed steroids and anti-viral drugs for me to start, and sent me off with the assurance that I would probably make a full recovery with low chance of any long-term problems. I picked up the meds on my way home, and I started the regimen first thing upon walking in the door. I looked at my face in the mirror again.

My face looks normal — there’s no noticeable facial drooping or distortion. Just my right eye is wide open compared to my left eye which adjusts normally to the lighting conditions. In bright light, my left eye squints and blinks, but the right eye just does nothing. This makes my left eye try to compensate by squinting and blinking more. The right side of my mouth doesn’t move, so I look like I’m snarling when I smile or laugh. My left face is animated like normal, but my right face is just “flat” and motionless.

The doctor, and all the online research I’ve done in the past few days, says this paralysis will last for weeks. Maybe 3-4, maybe 12+. And when the condition ends, my face should be right back to normal. Most people have no long-term problems or differences with their face. This fact is what helps me keep relatively calm about this thing. Knowing this isn’t permanent is the biggest relief. But months of this won’t be fun.

Talking, eating, and drinking are a little challenging, though not difficult. The biggest problem is my right eye not blinking. My eye dries out frequently, and it’s troublesome to have to close it manually while wearing reading glasses and using a computer keyboard and mouse. The first couple of days back at worked showed how really difficult maintaining my eye was going to be.

Now I’ve started taping down my eyelid with medical tape, and strapping on a patch over top of that. This keeps my eye moist and protected while working during the day and while sleeping at night. I take it all off every once in a while to let my eye breathe and to let my good eye get a rest from having to do the work of two. My reading speed is slowed considerably without binocular vision.

Fortunately I have a job where I sit in an office all day with minimal face-to-face interaction. Just today, my third day back at my work office, I emailed my immediate coworkers, (my team), what was going on, so when they see me, (and a few have), they know why I’m wearing an eye patch and sneering at them instead of smiling and laughing. I avoid going out in public because I’m embarrassed of my half-dead face.

So now I’m just hoping and hoping this condition ends sooner rather than later. But now I have an idea and a first prop for a pirate costume for Halloween. Arrr!

EDIT: Here is the post on my condition coming to an end.

Bullgrit

Friday night, Calfgrit13 went to an overnight “lock in” at Adventure Landing with a friend’s church group. His friend’s family picked him up from here at home after 8pm, and he spent the entire night playing laser tag, video games, driving go-carts, and generally doing anything to keep from falling asleep. Although CG13 says he did sleep for about an hour, in a chair, laying his head on a pillow on a table.

Saturday, Wifegrit had to work, so she got out of bed at 5:30, ate breakfast in the kitchen, took a shower, got dressed, and headed out to the hospital for her 12 hour shift in the mother/baby unit.

Calfgrit9 woke up before 7:00, came into our bedroom to let me know he was up, and then went down the kitchen to eat breakfast. I just continued to lay in bed for a while, until CG13 got home at about 7:30.

CG13 was tired, but happy from a night of fun. That was his first all-nighter. He has been to, and had, sleep-overs with friends before, but usually they do end up sleeping at least some of the night. As soon as he got upstairs, I put him right to bed. And he fell right to sleep.

This Saturday was a make-up school day for one of the snow days they had off earlier in the year. But we were letting CG13 skip this so he could participate in the lock-in Friday night, and sleep in Saturday. CG9, though, was going to school. So we got his stuff together in his backpack.

To kill some time until time to go, we shot some basketballs in our driveway. We have the basket up at the official 10′ height, so CG9 has to really get his whole body into every shot, and he does a pretty good job. He misses as much as he makes, but that’s pretty good for someone only 4′ tall and about 60 pounds.

At 8:45, I walked the little guy to school and wished him a fun time. It’d be only a half day, so I’d pick up at 12:35.

After that, I thought I’d get out and run an errand while CG13 continued to sleep. I went to Target and picked up a couple of items, and went to IHOP for a waffle breakfast. Then I went back to a quiet house. Perfect opportunity for a little personal quiet time. A mid-morning nap is a wonderful thing.

My phone alarm woke me up at noon. I got up, stretched, checked on CG13, (still sleeping), straightened up the kitchen, then headed out to walk to the school.

At the school, I stood out in the grassy “walkers’ point” with many other parents and waited for the bell to ring and the kids to be let out. I chatted with the dad of CG9’s friend for a bit, and then the kids came out. CG9 had a good day, and we talked about it on the walk back home.

CG13 had a trumpet practice at 1:30, so I had to wake him up before 1:00. We picked up lunch at a drive through on the way to the music school and ate it in my truck. CG9 and I sat through CG13’s practice, and then we all headed back home.

CG9 was anxious to get out and play with his neighborhood friends, and CG13 was wanting to just hang out alone in the house. He was still tired from the long night awake. And I was thinking about going for an afternoon run around the park lake behind our house.

At home, CG13 went up to his room. CG9 took their cell phone and went across the street to play with friends. And I changed into my running clothes. I stuck my head in CG13’s door to tell him I was going out running. I called CG9 on his phone to let him know, too. Then I took off.

The sun was warm, the air was fresh, and I ran and ran and ran, (with a couple of walk breaks, too). I ended up going for over an hour, [brag]burning 983 calories[/brag], according to my heart rate monitor. I wanted to keep going, to break through 1,000 calories, but CG9 wanted to bring his friends inside our house for a board game. (They can’t have friends inside the house unless there is a parent inside, also.) So I ended my run and let the boys inside.

While I had been out running, Wifegrit called to say she was getting off work early. Yay! She ran an errand right after and then came home. When she got here, we hung out a bit, sitting on the front porch, talking. Then we went inside and I made chicken and stuffing for dinner. We had a nice meal at the kitchen table. Afterward, the boys and I played an hour of Minecraft — I created a new survival server, and we had a big ball together.

Then we herded the boys into their showers. When they were finished, Wifegrit took over getting them into bed while I took my own shower. Yes, I had been a bit post-run stinky for a couple hours by this point. Such happens sometimes when one thing happens right after another during a family day. But I was all clean and fresh for bedtime.

Although it had been a very unusual Saturday, what with one boy sleeping in half the day, the other going to school, the wife working part of the day, and me getting over an hour of free running time, but it was a pretty good day. A pretty good day.

Bullgrit

Managing a web site with a blog has shown me the craziness of comment spam. We’ve all seen email spam, and some of you may have seen comment spam on various other web sites. But what most people don’t see is the full enormity and ridiculousness of what doesn’t usually show up in comment sections. This web site is built with WordPress, and a common, (practically required), plugin for WP is Akismet. It is essentially the guardian of the comments section.

This blog is relatively minor — several hundred visitors a week. And I get 50-100 spam comments each day! I got 88 in the past 24 hours! Akismet catches them all. I go through my spam list every so often and look to see if some legitimate comment got caught in the spam filter. Occasionally I find one, but most often I give up looking through the hundreds of comments and just delete them all without checking every single one.

I understand the intention of comment spam. I understand how they’re automated and posted without any real connection to the web site. But actually seeing the spam, it boggles my mind. For instance, here is a common example of comment spam this site has received:

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I removed the 22 links in the above “comment.” This is just a post of a string of links. No sales pitch, no enticement, no trick, just a string of links. If this got past Akismet, (or whatever spam filter a site might be using), it would be an obvious string of links. Like this:

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What purpose could such a comment spam serve? Does the spammer, (the person who created the bot that runs the automated comment posting), actually expect to get visitors through such links? When such comments get past spam filters, do people actually click the links?

And then there are the spammers who seem to at least try to get past the filters. Comments like this:

Order your results by revcnalee rather than publication date (unless publication date is important to you for whatever reason). It’s so much easier to find the best articles at the top of the results page rather than having to scroll down and look for them.

There were no links in that text for me to remove. It’s just a couple of poorly written sentences with no contextual connection with the blog post it was posted to. There seems to be no purpose to that comment.

And then every once in a while, some random comment spam turns out hilarious. For instance, this:

Joann Trainer – What a great shot! You sure had quite a distance to run back and forth from. Glad to hear you had a great trip.

That comment was posted to Our Night in the ER. A post about our then 6 year old son vomiting up blood and us taking him to the Emergency Room over night, got a spam comment saying, “Glad to hear you had a great trip.” Funny.

Well, anyway. I just thought I’d give a glimpse behind the scenes of managing a web site. Spammers are weird.

Bullgrit

My last post declared that I’m not a divorced dad. But this weekend I almost became one. Wifegrit and I worked together to straighten up and clean out the garage. That’s the real test of how strong a marriage is.

We’ve agreed to divide our home into “His Area” and “Her Area.” The His Area is the office — the one room where I have complete say over how it’s arranged and decorated. This place, where I’m sitting right now to write this post, (and where I play my games and generally just screw around and waste time), is my domain. Maybe you’ve seen it.

Although Wifegrit has a desk and computer in this room, it’s still my domain. She may shake her head at the decor, or may close the door when she has guests over, but she allows me this one area as my uncontested geek cave. Because the Her Area of our home is every other room in the house.

She may ask my opinion on some curtain or chair or shelf or knickknack, (and I share the cleaning duties throughout), but the layout, the decor, the choices are all up to her last word on the subject. And I’m completely fine with that. Her taste is much better than mine — I mean, just look at my office. As a stay at home mom, the whole house is essentially her office. I don’t mess with her arrangements, (unless she asks my help), and I don’t complain about how she organizes. (Not that there’s really anything to complain about, anyway.)

But something we never decided on a master for, and something we both use about an equal amount, is the garage. Unlike some folks, we actually use our garage for parking our cars, (her minivan, my SUV). So it needs to be somewhat clear, with tools and toys and storage stuff organized smartly. This weekend we both got out there for our annual spring cleaning. Now that the weather is warm and comfortable, we can put away the winter tools and decorations that have been crammed to the sides waiting for this day.

So we spent a few hours moving this and that, clearing out that and this, and just getting the room neat and tidy and useful. But since we both use the room, we sometimes have different ideas or preferences on where things should go. One of us will spend ten minutes organizing an area only to have the other one come over right after and move the stuff either to a place that they like better or to make room for something else in that spot. One of us will move containers or shelving to a spot and then the other will ask, “Did you sweep the floor over there?” Frustrations rise. Arguments get fought out. Because neither of us is the sole master of that area.

But, fortunately, we’re best friends. So like any best friends, we can have a blow out argument over some ridiculously minor thing, and then turn around and laugh and hug. In the end, after about three hours of work and argument and laughter, we had a nice, neat, and useful garage again. All ready for the summer.

We’ve proven our home and marriage can survive with dual masters for one room, once a year.

Bullgrit