My face hurts. (I can hear my dear friend from high school in my mind, teasing me when I say that. "Your face hurts me too.") But I have a good reason for it to feel icky. I had needles poked in my face, scalp, and neck around 31 times this morning. It was Botox-for-migraines day. It has to be refreshed every 12 weeks, and you really don't want to stretch out time in between treatments. In the week before the refresher course, it's like a light switch shutting off, and all of the aura symptoms come back, like hot flashes and dizziness. The needle injection part is awful. The needles themselves are super tiny, but because it's into your scalp, you can hear them going in. It's as loud as poking a pencil into dense styrofoam, and almost as irritating of a sound. The liquid oozes back out of the injection sites just a little, along with a tiny amount of blood. My neurologist (this is the doctor who prescribed this treatment for me) and I just hung out and chatted while he kept wiping the blood and pink solution off of my face, for a solid two or three minutes. I wonder whether I got as big of a dose as last time because so much pushed back out. I can still sort of frown, twelve hours later. It feels like tiny little bruises all around my forehead, over my ears, and down the sides of my neck. It will cease being noticeable soon, but for now I'm hyperaware of it.
In the parking garage, leaving my appointment, I noticed something that made me smile. I think the whole row I parked in used to be handicapped parking, back when this location was the main hospital. The blue signs were pulled off the wall, and "patient parking" was spray-painted on with stencils. There were squiggle marks where the adhesive was applied to the concrete to hold the restricted parking signs. Like this:
The squiggle was different in the parking stall next to mine. It looked like someone leaned over from the top of the wall outside of the garage, and drew an upside down smiley face with a glue gun. To wit:
I bet I would have done that. Or I would have drawn words, or something super sophomoric and somewhat obscene. I really identify with that glue-gun wielder.
I tried to take pictures of my flowers in snow when I got home. I crouched down in baseball-catcher pose, and tried to line up a shot with a cell phone camera that had the screen brightness way too low and transition lenses on my camera as dark as they could be in the snow. Three pictures, and not one properly aligned. Here I thought I'd have a new cover photo. Instead I barely even got something I can use on the Facebook link to tonight's post. And then I almost couldn't get back up out of my crouch. Not my finest work.
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