The Beginning - Part 1

It all started innocently enough. A tingle here, a twinge there. A funny feeling in my feet sometimes when I bent my neck. The occasional dizzy spell. "That's odd," I would think. But I never gave these little anomalies a second thought. Why should I? They were nothing. It was my poor posture, my lack of sleep, my terribly uncomfortable but gorgeous shoes. It was just one of those things, I thought. It's fine.

Then I woke up one morning, in the Summer of 2005, with the entire right side of my face and my ear completely numb. My first thought was that I really must have slept funny and I tried to get moving so as to return the blood flow to my face. But the numbness didn't go away. All day. How weird, I thought. It was annoying, but I went about my day.

But the numbness continued on for several days, by which time I was becoming a tad concerned. I had a wisdom tooth on that side of my face that my dentist had been advising me to get removed for some time now. "Great," I thought. Now I'm paying the price for my procrastination.

However, a visit to my dentist and an x-ray revealed that the tooth was actually fine and wasn't anywhere near a facial nerve; my dentist assured me that the tooth was not causing the problem. I left his office baffled, but relieved I wasn't going to need an emergency tooth extraction. A few days later the numbness went away and I forgot all about it.

The following months went on as usual and I was feeling fine. I still had the odd tingle or dizzy spell here and there, but it was never anything that lingered and I continued to think nothing of it. That is, until the morning of March 6 the following year.