FACE VALUE
The day after I gave birth to twins, a lactation consultant came to my hospital room to see how the babies were feeding. My mother was holding one baby, while I breastfed the other. The consultant tried to teach me how to feed both of them at the same time. Then she looked at me curiously. “Your eye looks droopy,“ she said.
Taken aback, I tried a joke: “Yes, my eyes are a little droopy,” I acknowledged. “I’m Irish.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said, kind but firm. “Go look in the mirror.”
The left half of my face had fallen down. Eyebrow, fallen; eyelid, fallen; lip fallen, frozen, immovable. A stroke? I was astonished – my face hadn’t felt any different before I looked in the mirror. I tried to move my face. Impossible. Puppet face, strings cut. I called my husband, Tony, who is always calm, and told him I couldn’t move the left side of my face. He told me to call the obstetrician immediately and have him call a neurologist. Then he said: “I’ll be over in 10 minutes.”
Tony is a child psychiatrist. He is the sort of
