previous: Moving Up in the World
Does That Ring a Bell?
We’d been talking for about an hour when my eye started bothering me. It felt dry and itchy and altogether unpleasant. I asked Claudia whether it looked okay. She said it was red. She offered me some eye drops. I accepted. They didn’t help.
A little bit later I took a sip of tea and dribbled some onto my shirt. I tried again, with the same result. “You okay?” Claudia said.
“I’m not sure.” I tried pursing my lips. “Kind of feels like the novocaine’s wearing off.”
“What novocaine?”
“Exactly.”
“You do look a little odd.”
“In what way?”
“Unbalanced, sort of. I can’t really explain it. Here, look.”
She pulled out a compact and opened it and handed it over. I took a look.
A Dick Tracy villain stared back at me. Or Tommy Lee Jones in whichever Batman movie he was in, or Aaron Eckhart in the new one. The left side of my face didn't move at all. The corner of my mouth was turned down.
Brain tumor, I thought, and investigated more closely.
Next discovery: I couldn't blink my left eye. Not easily, anyway. I had to make a concerted effort. Even then, I had to close the right one at the same time.
Or muscular dystrophy. Or cystic fibrosis. No, wait, that one’s respiratory . . .
I handed back the compact.
Or Parkinson’s. Or a stroke.
Thoughts of mortality slipped in.
Or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and that was when I started to get scared.
Claudia Acuna hadn’t worked a manual transmission for a long time, but eventually we made it to the emergency room at Cedars. There was probably one closer, but neither of us knew where. I waited there forty-five minutes, reviewing every dread disease I could think of. Then they stuck me in a room. It was tiny and it smelled like lilacs. Which didn’t seem right. My sense of smell was off. Or maybe just the left half of my sense of smell.
I sat there another half hour. The door opened. A doctor, a tiny Asian woman who looked like she was about seventeen, stuck her head in. She looked at me, at the chart she was carrying, back at me. Then she left.
“But ...” I said to the Lipitor poster on the back of the door.
The door opened again. She was back. “What seems to be the trouble?” she said.
Seems to be? Seems to be?
“It’s my face,” I said, and laid out my symptoms, wiping away what turned out to be imaginary drool as I went.
When I was done, she said, “Mr. Portugal, you have Bell’s palsy.”
All I heard was the palsy part. I pictured myself hanging out with Jerry Lewis on Labor Day. Look at us, we’re walking. “Is it fatal?”
The doctor—her name was Dr. Perez, which seemed a little off—smiled and said, “Bell’s palsy, Mr. Spain. Not cerebral or anything else dreadful. And, no, it’s not fatal. It’s not even permanent.”
“Thank God.”
“Not usually.”
“Not usually fatal or not usually permanent?”
“Not usually permanent. Ninety-five percent of patients recover fully. Or ninety-eight. The data’s inconsistent.”
“And the other five? Or two, as the case may be?” Good to know my math skills were intact.
She made a notation on my chart. “Let’s not think about that.”
“How did I get it?”
“Who knows?”
“That’s reassuring.”
“No one knows the cause for sure. Have you had anything viral lately?”
“The flu, a couple of weeks ago.”
“Might be that.” She launched into a story involving my seventh cranial nerve and a hole in my skull. Somewhere along the line I tuned out to feel sorry for himself. I came back online when I heard, “Might be two weeks. Might be six months.”
“How can I make it two weeks?”
“You can’t. It does what it does.”
“That’s very zen.”
“Appropriate from a Japanese-American doctor, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, but your name is Perez.”
“Critical thinking intact. Let me make a note of that.”
“There’s nothing I can do for it?”
“I’m going to prescribe an anti-inflammatory and an anti-viral. That may cut the recovery time. The data’s—”
“Inconsistent,” I said.
It got what might have been a smile out of her. “Do you have a pair of swim goggles?”
“Why? Does swimming help? The chlorine or something?”
“Many patients report the worst part of Bell’s palsy is not being able to blink the eye on the affected side. Swim goggles aid the discomfort.”
“I’ll get some.”
“Good. Then we’re done here. I’ve got a bullet wound to tend to.”
“You took a frozen face before a bullet wound?”
She was writing on a prescription pad. “It’s just a flesh wound. Nothing serious. Actually, I walked into the wrong examination room, but you looked so scared ... anyway, here’s your prescription. Let your GP know what’s going on.”
I tried to convince Claudia Acuna that, fortified with the knowledge that I wasn’t about to die, I was ready to jump back on the case. She didn’t believe me and neither did I.
She drove me to the Big 5 at Wilshire and San Vicente. They had at least a dozen kinds of swim goggles. I picked a couple that looked like they might work and went in search of a mirror. I’d gotten the first one out of its package when I heard, “You can’t do that.”
I turned. He was around six-five and built like Hulk Hogan. The badge on his sculptured chest declared his name was Bud.
“I can’t do what?” I said, then added “Bud” because I figured it was the only time in my life I’d ever get to address anybody that way.
“Try on the goggles. It’s not sanitary.”
“It isn’t a jockstrap, for Christ’s sake.”
“We let people try those on.”
“You let people try on jockstraps but not goggles? What kind of place is this?”
“You have to try on jockstraps over your underwear.”
“If I put my underwear on my head can I try on goggles over them?”
Without blinking—which gave us half of something in common—he said, “I don’t think so.” Then, “What’s wrong with your face?”
“I’ve got Bell’s palsy.”
“It looks awful.”
I held out a random pair of goggles. “I’ll take these.”
Hulk Jr. took them from me. “I’ll ring you up.” I followed him to the checkout. “Anything else?” he said.
“I don’t think so. I’m not very athletic.”
An appraising look. “No,” said the big fella. “You’re not.”
The author intrudes:
Well, this is quite a development, isn’t it? All this other stuff going on, and Joe’s afflicted. How will it affect his search for Frankie Roja, the mystery of Artemis Gluck’s killer, the task of housing all L.A.’s homeless?
The answer: Hell, I don’t know. Fact of the matter is, Joe’s not the only one with Bell’s palsy. I’ve got it too. It’s my second time. The first was in early 1994, just a couple of months after I got married. It lasted three weeks.
I’m hoping this time’s just as short. Or shorter. Because, for one thing, it makes working at the computer difficult. The goggles help—yes, I’m wearing them too, though I was able to find a deserted corner of Big 5 and try them on to my heart’s content—but I’ve got to take them off when I’m at the computer because I can’t see anything with them on.
So I’ve got to limit my computer time, and one thing that’ll suffer is this serial. I’m putting it on hold until I recover. Hope you’ll understand.
Then how, you ask, did I manage to write the installment you just read? Did I, in my infinite wisdom, know that I was about to have a recurrence?
I did not. But I had most of this chunk written. I wrote it years ago—I don’t remember the circumstances—and have been looking for a place to put it ever since. In a Joe Portugal story, or elsewhere. Finally I’ve got my chance.
Be back soon ...
Comments
Nathan, good stuff! I hope you recover soon. Matt
2008-10-20 by Matt Witten