Bell's Palsy: 2020 Nonfiction RUNNER-UP
WORDS BY TAYGAN BEATON.
In a remote cabin in the Northern Californian woods, I stuck my pinkie finger in my ear to itch an annoyance. In a minute moment of discomfort, my razor-sharp fingernail scratched my ear canal. Months earlier, operating a weary, forest green Toyota Camry, I crossed the border from Canada into the United States of America. I was travelling with Alex—my long-haired French-Canadian partner—and his small black cat Bagheera. It was late in the summer, early in the day, and the beginning of our months-long journey to a Rainbow Gathering deep in the Mexican jungle.
The cabin was log, with a sharp A-frame roof from which bunches of drying flora hung. A wooden ladder led to a mezzanine where we slept on the provided mattress with our own well used sleeping bags. Below, a faded blue denim couch sat upon poorly maintained floorboards next to a combustion heater. In the day, without permission to run the generator, the light under which we worked streamed from a creamy sky light. We placed our two camp chairs underneath it, sat opposite each other, spot lighted in the gloom. On a medicinal marijuana farm the clip, clip, clip of our monotonous employment was silenced by my Quebecois partner’s love for French rap, played through a dented nineties stereo with clay remnants between the buttons, alluding to its history.
In those last weeks in our chairs, communication was sparse and hardly idle. I was angry with Alex because he was leaving me for Quebec. At this point, we had worked, lived, slept, and eaten with each other every day for six months, yet I was angry that I would soon be travelling alone. When your imagined future is taken away, sometimes anger is more concrete, more familiar and easier to deal with than the chaos that ensues. Anger can be the wall of fire that protects the hurt.
It was during one of our tense seated sessions that a searing pain tore through my ear. The pain bled up my face and deep into my skull as I fell from my chair and crawled to the couch. I couldn’t help but moan. The most severe earache I had ever experienced was disabling, and in the middle of the California wilderness, there was no olive oil, no old wives’ remedies; there was nothing I could do. It was over as quick as it started, and honestly, amidst all our domestic dramas, I forgot about it.
Days later, I was speaking down from the mezzanine, negotiating our last checks with the burly, paranoid farm owner as he stood backlit in the entryway. I remember asking “what is going on with my tongue?”—I had the weirdest taste in my mouth as we said our goodbyes.
~
We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in silence; minutes earlier, Alex had once again acted in his own best interests, hurting me in the process.
“I’m not driving you all the way to the airport!” he had said.
“Of course you’re not!” I had screamed.
At a corner Starbucks in San Francisco, he and I went our separate ways. After six months of being consistently by each other’s sides, all the shrieking thoughts brought about by poor communication built a wall of rage where sweet goodbyes should have been. We parted without a hug, not even for Bagheera—a decision that broke my heart until we met again.
I googled my way to a central hostel and, in order of priority after months stuck in the woods, I showered thoroughly and eagerly took advantage of the book swap. In a tight, two-bunk dorm room, internet apologies were mutually sent and received between Alex and I. I fell into a deep sleep Saturday evening, with a plane leaving for Cancun, Mexico on Monday.
Upon waking, I made my way downstairs to participate in the hostel’s free breakfast. Between the hum of other travellers, I chose a cereal, poured it into a thin, tinny, white bowl and slid onto a stool at a bar. As I lifted the spoon, I was horrified to find I couldn’t insert it into my mouth. I grabbed my face and tried once more. The horror that washed through me was preceded by the thought that I was in public without realising my face was swollen. Living in the woods had eliminated my need for a mirror so I hadn’t checked my face before breakfast—why would I? I dumped my uneaten cereal, rinsed my bowl and ran upstairs to a mirror. The bathroom was shared but empty. I held onto the door frame and stared intently. To my relief, my face looked normal. I sighed and smiled. My eyes widened and I rushed inside, slamming the door. I smiled again in the mirror. Only one side of my face was moving! The left side of my face was completely paralysed.
Previous experience in America saw me informed that a trip to the emergency room will cost between $300 and $500 initially, just to see a doctor and not including any recommended intervention following. I was sure I was experiencing a dental issue. My niggling, indecisive wisdom tooth was obviously pushing on a motor nerve, or so I reasoned. It wasn’t unusual for Canadians and Americans to travel to Cancun for dental work, as it was almost a quarter the price and performed to a high standard. I made the decision to wait a day until seeking treatment.
So, I spent a day in San Francisco with a paralysed face. It took me arriving at the post-office and finding them closed to remember it was Sunday. On the way back to the hostel, I stopped at a wall plastered with posters for The Lion Kingmusical, something that, at this stage, I had wanted to see for years. I entered the mouth of the Orpheum Theatre and approached a woman in a neat blazer, sitting behind tinted glass. When I asked about tickets and she spurted figures reminiscent of emergency room prices, I must have looked disappointed with half of my face. She volunteered that discounted tickets for any unsold seats were available half an hour before the show. I pivoted, with a spring in my step and plans for that evening, I set about finding the sustenance I was denied earlier.
A doorway-shaped hole in the wall led into a hallway sized Mexican restaurant serving burritos and other Americanisms. In Canada, where the unripe avocados have travelled from two boarders south, guacamole is two bucks a tablespoon. A sneak peak of the abundance that was soon to be my tropical life came in the form of a fat, avocado-filled, aluminium-foil-wrapped burrito that to this day was the best I had ever tasted. I sat outside on the picnic bench provided and explored manoeuvring my new mouth. It became apparent that the strange taste in my mouth from a few days previous was actually the feeling of numbness in half of my tongue.
Half an hour before the musical, dressed in the best my backpack could offer, the same woman took my crumpled American dollars in exchange for a ticket. With all the giddiness of a kid meeting their hero, I ventured further into the theatre’s mouth. I was ushered into the third row, making my way across legs to a seat centre stage. I blinked away tears of gratitude from one eye and wiped the other.
~
If San Francisco is the classy, well-kept, stone mansion, Cancun is the run down, seventies corner store with chipped tiles. It is hot and I am sticky when I arrive at dusk. The sunset glows like a tequila sunrise, bouncing just enough orange light that the silhouette of the buildings looks dirty rather than romantic. It is well past a dental office’s closing time when I disembark a bus near my hostel, and I am tired from the trip. I quickly search an address for the morning, choosing Sunshine Dental Clinic, near the Canadian embassy.
In the backseat of a white cab I clutched the paper on which I had pencilled the address. I didn’t barter the price, 100 pesos was roughly ten dollars, and in the grand scheme of things I valued my face mobility over arguing for a taxi driver’s dollar or two. The familiar flag of the land from which I had travelled so many months earlier, red and white against the morning’s blue sky, filled me with the warming, secure feeling of home. I bounced up the stairs and the woman at the clinic’s reception was becoming in her warmth and helpfulness. She organised a dentist to see me almost immediately and beamed in my direction while I sat momentarily in the crisp cool of the sterile waiting room. I was firstly taken in for X-rays and then applied to a reclined dentist’s chair. A male and female in aqua green scrubs buzzed busily behind me until a blond dentist on a roller chair glided into my line of site and removed his mask. He informed me that my wisdom teeth were not the cause of my paralysation. The panic of my previous choices fell into my body like bricks from a loader. This was my third day paralysed and I was yet to see a doctor. I was grievously misled by my own instincts and reason. As panic played out in my body, the dentists informed me that they had already scheduled an appointment for me at the hospital with their English-speaking doctor friend. A cab driver was waiting out front and he knew the address. The feelings of relief, gratitude, panic, worry, and regret stirred through me like an over-active lava lamp. The wonderful dentists, whom I would never forget, waved me goodbye with concern.
At the hospital I was scared. I was in over my head. My basic grasp of Spanish did not include medical terms, nor apparently, hospital signposts. A nurse at a curved counter did not seem to speak English. My suspicions that, for her, it was a choice took a back seat when she appeared to, begrudgingly, know who I was. I sat on my hands in the waiting room, using breathing to counter my anxiety, and failing.
A tiny doctor appeared from around a corner. He said my name in the distinguishable accent of one who was taught English by Americans. I was led into a room in which the fluorescents above were off. The only source of light was a rectangular window at street level on the outside, and scalp level on the inside. It wasn’t his office, just a small, grey, square room with one table and two chairs. He invited me to sit, placed a folder before him and listened to my plight. When he stood to inspect my ears and throat, he was as tall as I was seated. He sat back down and informed me of his diagnosis. I had Bell’s Palsy. He explained that the nerve that was running the movement of my face had become infected. As that nerve passed through a bone in the jaw, its infection and subsequent inflammation was pressing on the bone and impeding the motor movement of the left side of my face. While writing the script for twelve days of antibiotics, he announced my Bell’s Palsy may clear up in a few weeks, or months, or never. As I processed that information, he continued that my left eye was not closing completely, and if not properly cared for, my eyeball would dry out and I would go blind. He scribbled the name of a pharmacy close by from which I could acquire an eye patch for sleeping and eyedrops for consistent application throughout the day. I repeated my gratitude verbally, over and over as he ushered me towards the door. Words didn’t seem like enough; I wanted to squeeze him into a bear hug but resisted and instead promised to see him in twelve days. In the meantime, I boarded a bus headed for the jungle with my eye patch. Neither going solo nor Bell’s Palsy halted my trip to the Rainbow Gathering.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I paid little attention to the Empire Times creative competition until the very last moments. Some people would call that procrastination, but I’d like to call it ‘inspired by a deadline’. I read the instructions and was convinced I already had a poem that would be fitting. For the life of me, I couldn’t find where I had saved it and instead stumbled across the notes I had written about my experience with Bell’s Palsy, which I intended to be a short story someday. I figured now was as good a time as any to write it! It was an ambitious task, but it could probably be done before the deadline. I found it difficult to sift through which events helped tell the story, and which needed far more than 2000 words of context to be adequately explained. I wanted to tell a true but funny story that didn’t use hindsight to clean up relationship dramas or brush over my decisions. So here we are, my non-fiction experience made into a piece of writing with my true-to-form terrible decision-making and questionable priorities brought into the limelight.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article has been reuploaded and was originally published in 2020.