The day my face stopped working.

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Last year, just before my 30th birthday my world came crashing down. I had been suffering with a mild bout of flu and what i thought was the beginnings of an inner ear infection. Life had been stressful for the previous months in many ways - the senior minister of the church I worked for had just left and the rest of the ministry team was on holidays. I was working crazy hours to keep a church of 300 or so going in difficult circumstances. I had been married six weeks, I was adjusting to a different type of life in a new house in new circumstances and I was also trying to pick up some shifts in a second job, do some study and volunteer time to another ministry.

I woke up at around 10am on a Wednesday morning (the night after an Elders meeting that had gone til 11.30pm) and as I attempted to get out of bed I realised that all was not well. My head swam and my vision began to wobble before me. I took my time in getting out of bed and made my way to the bathroom. All the way down the hallway I found myself walking off to the left - if I'd let myself I would have walked in circles. I was also aware that the left side of my face felt numb.

As I stared into the mirror and tried to focus on the face I saw there I realised that not only did I feel abnormal but that I was looking at a reflection that wasn't quite right. In fact the left side of my face looked like it had dropped half an inch. On further examination I realised that not was I looking rather 'twisted' but that I could not move any part of the left side of my face. My left eye wouldn't blink, my eyebrow wouldn't move and my mouth wouldn't open.

My initial reaction was to laugh (in a lopsided kind of way) - maybe I'd slept on a funny angle and it would take a few minutes to get going. I tried to 'warm up' my left side - but nothing I did helped. As I tried to get things working nauseousness swept over me and I had to sit on the floor to stop myself falling over - my balance was completely out of wack. I began to worry. The week before I had visited an older member of our church who had had a stroke and I began to see some of the similarities between our symptoms.

After vomiting up last nights dinner I managed to walk in a straight line over to the phone to call V. My speech was pretty bad - I think I might have freaked her out a little - and so she immediately booked me an appointment at the doctor at the end of our street. I took my time on the walk down to the doctor - the neighbours must have thought I was drunk. The doctor didn't know what was wrong with me - he suggested that maybe I had had a mild stroke - although my symptoms didn't quite match up. He called V and told her to come get me and take me to the local ER.

After about 7 hours of being poked, prodded, tested, questioned and told to wait I was told that I had Bells Palsy ( in short i had damage to my facial nerves that effected hearing, balance and caused paralysis of the left side of my face) The good news was that it was not too serious and that I had a 80% chance of returning to normal. The bad news was that it would probably take a couple of months of rest and that it was a stress induced condition that would recur under high stress.

The 6-7 weeks that followed was a depressing time for me. The anti viral drugs I was put on made me quite ill for a few weeks - I couldn't drive because my balance was bad, I had to cancel my 30th party, I felt terribly guilty about leaving my church in the lurch (poetic stuff) and about the pressure me being sick put upon V only 6 weeks into our marriage (she never realised how soon the 'sickness and in health' would come into play). I felt very out of control.

Things eventually began to improve. Today (14 months later) I'm almost 100% again - the only lasting impact has been that I tend to speak out of the right side of my mouth now, especially when I'm tired. But there have been other lasting impacts.

The main one was that it was a real wake up call for me in terms of my view of ministry. I came out of the experience realising that there is so much more to life than my position at church. I realised that I had become somewhat consumed by ministry and had allowed it to impinge upon other areas of life.

Diet, exercise, days off, friendships, holidays and a more relaxed attitude towards life in general have become so much more important to me in recent months.

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