Day One

I'm posting from the Univ of Wisconsin Health Center where we are waiting to begin my second day with Jackie Diels. Yesterday was a long day - six hours! Spent most of the morning doing evaluations of my facial movement, including all the weird (inappropriate) movements. Jackie took pictures and video, so we'll be able to see the starting point.

We spent the afternoon "stretching out" my face! Yep, that's pretty wieird sounding, isn't it? At one point, I am pretty sure I had my entire fist inside my mouth. There were a few places where I was laughing so hard I had to stop. However, the amazing thing is that I could feel a difference immediately!!

Apparently, I have a lot of knotted up muscles all over my face - and this is at least part of what is causing my mouth to pull up and my eye to squint. She is having me work on each of the knotted places - these are the random "sore spots" that I've had all over my face since I started to regain feeling. It was great to finally find out what was causing all those sore spots - they feel very sore to the touch, almost as if I had a severe bruise.

The highlight of my day was when Jackie said that she thinks a lot of the weird movements are caused by these muscle spasms, and not necessariy synkinesis. We'll have a better idea on this as we work on it today and tomorrow. However, that would be great news since muscle spasms are curable whereas synkinesis is not. Which means that I can fix at least some of this. I found myself welling up when she told me this. I guess what I realized at that moment was that I was terrified that she was going to tell me nothing could be done. Wow.

We got done a little before 4 yesterday and headed back to our hotel room It snowed all day, but was a very light snow with less than an inch accumulation. So, since the roads were fine, we headed into downtown Madison to go to Harvest, a restaurant I had read about that features farm-to-table food. Everything is local and/or organic. Very small menu - maybe 10 entrees and 6 starters; however, everything was perfectly prepared and absolutely delicious! And, perhaps best of all - noise level was very low, so we were able to chat through dinner without a problem and I left not feeling frustrated and tired! Yay!

I wrapped up the day with about an hour of facial stretches in the room before we both hit the sack and slept.

So, it was a very good day and I am feeling optimistic.

By the way, Happy Birthday, Dad!!