Waking up after 12 hours without hydrocodone feels like someone turned the gravity up to 5000. I’m a constellation of all the aches and pains it has graciously allowed me to ignore over the last 3 days, but I’m no longer floating through space. My body feels like a jumbled bag of clanging weights with no padding. The one part I actually WANT to feel is still numb to the touch. It’s like having a stranger’s skin grafted to the side of my head. It’s swollen and distorted with no internal feedback loop to complete the circuit of my accidental pokes and scratches. How will I ever know if I have something on that side of my face? The extent of the damage to the facial nerve is unclear at this point. I keep expecting it to wake up. It’s that feeling of sleeping too hard on an extremity and all the blood is about to rush back in and any minute I’ll be whole again. She said it would probably stay like that. I can trace a line around the seemingly arbitrary edges of numbness, the lower half of my ear, everything behind it out to the nape, a radial from there up to the middle of my chin, everything within the hollow up my left cheek. I’m surprised I can even move it. When I’m not touching it this line feels like an event horizon, a gravity well encroaching slowly from the left, pulling information from disconnected senses and sending it straight into oblivion. Not unlike the various ways I’ve imagined a stroke would feel. Would the tumor have ever done this much damage if I’d left it?