I’ll cut right to the chase gentle reader. I look a mess. I have a droopy face and mouth, an eye that won’t shut, slurred speech and horrible side effects from steroids. In short, I have Bell’s Palsy. Not something I ever thought I would hear myself saying and what’s more, not something I knew very much about until now.

But I’ve got it for sure, and it’s a bugger.

It’s something that I could really do without as well. I mean having fibromyalgia and Depressive Anxiety Disorder are more than enough to be going on with I think. But no, I have been visited by Bell’s Palsy and am reliably informed that it could take between 4 to 9 months to clear up. Oh deep joy!

I’m not even sure how it happened. In fact, nobody ever is. One minute I was happily cooking tea for me and Ange and the next I was talking like Roy Hattersley’s Spitting Image puppet. Yeah, just like that.

I have drops for my eye which is very sore, and extremely red and angry to the point where I now wear a piratical looking eye patch to hide it and to get a little light relief (get it? Light relief? No? Please yourselves) and I’m on a course of ten, yes you read that correctly, ten, steroid tablets a day.

I’m not sure how they help the palsy but they’re playing all merry havoc with the rest of me.

Long story short, I feel like crap and not very creative at all. My sleep is badly disturbed, which I put down to the aforementioned steroids, and I’m finding it incredibly hard to concentrate on anything much. As for eating and drinking… let’s just say, your average toddler makes less of a mess with their food than I do right now as it pours out of the side of my mouth with every bite or sip I take.

My mood is at an all time low and I really don’t feel like writing. The fact that I’m constructing this very brief blog post is nothing short of a miracle. I started at seven o’clock this morning and I’m just wrapping it up now at ten past one in the afternoon. There’s a bit of an indication of the state of play, or rather lack of it.

I’m going to lie down now in a darkened room and I’m not joking when I say that. I’d love to sit and read but it hurts my sight to do that. So I’ll probably just try and get some chemically aided sleep; there’s a box of diazepam in the bedside table. Yummy!

They say you can’t keep a good man down but right now I’m very down. Oh, I’ll be back, you can rely on that. Can’t say when but I can say where. Right here on this blog.

See you soon.

A x