| |
|
Well, I think the story is going to be over soon unless something super-bad happens to me. I had the stitches out today, which hurt like billy-o , but after a couple of hours of extreme tenderness, it seems to have eased off onto a quite OK plateau. The slit under my eye is just astonishingly close to the eye, maybe 3 mm away ~ you wonder with horror what would have happened if the surgeon coughed at the wrong moment ~ which is good in terms of near-invisibility (vain!) but as I said, it's probably one of the most super-sensitive places on your whole body.
I have a totally dead zone on my face, across the cheek and upper lip, but apart from it feeling really weird to touch, and odd when drinking, I guess that's not really an area you need nerves in. The nerves may be killed there permanently; I don't blame them. I looked at a photo I took of my face last week and I was horrified by how I'd become used to something that really looked like a special effect ~ entirely caved and zombie-hollow around the eye. There was a nub of wrong bone sticking out at one point, kind of wedged under the skin... like a rock. I guess that was the corner of the "orbit", the eye-socket bone, at the wrong angle. I honestly don't quite know how I brought myself to wash it every night: although actually I do, thinking about it. I used to tell myself, it's still your face.
And my left eye is swimmy. Again, the "hammock" of muscle, as the registrar explained in grim detail until I almost fainted in front of a group of medico students, was forced and warped under and against those wrong-angled bones. (I'm just sharing the grimness here! I'm v squeamish myself.) My vision kind of pulls focus on the left eye occasionally, but if I give myself rests from reading and so on, it seems alright.
Anyway the good news for me is that I have finished my diet of chemicals and chalk, three huge pills with every meal, and starting now, six days after surgery, I should be able to get my body working on normal things again instead of medical junk. I am feeling more myself already. I sat in my grandparents' garden this afternoon looking up through a leaf arrangement at a sky tinted deeper blue by my sunglasses, and could feel quite content.
Of course this story won't really end as I will just merge back into the broader context of Barbelith, and continue as, always I suppose, a survivor. But I do very much thank everyone who has travelled this with me ~ who have given me support on here and pm ~ as it went down and down and as I started what I hope is a steady climb back to my... dubious former glories. |
|
|
