The bells, the bells

It is as I feared. While, if I look back, I can see a considerable improvement in my condition, the sense of wellness I thought I detected as the New Year turned has proved to be something of an illusion. My face has got much better, I can almost see a hint of smile where there was once just a droop, but I am still subject to sudden burst of intense weariness and a general weakness leaving me with a strange sense of vulnerability. On top of that there are a variety of mysterious pains in various parts of my body, which come and go with great unpredictability. Above all, it is the going onness that is the hardest thing to deal with. It feels as if it will never end.
The sense of endlessness coincides with my awareness that my time in Chile is coming to an end. Tomorrow we leave our apartment and move to Mimi’s mother’s house in Vina Del Mar. A few days later we will be on our way back to London. The thought of being in London feeling as I do now is not inspiring. At least here I have the sights and sounds of summer to lift my spirits when things begin to feel to grey.
London, in contrast, will be grey and dark and the tasks that await my return are largely dreary too. However, and here is the touch of brightness I must cling to, while the dreary tasks must be done, lying beyond them are opportunities to shift into a new context. A drift away from the dreary into something more demanding and satisfactory. Yet another lurch in what I could laughingly call my career.
So how will I look back at my experience of Bell’s Palsy and all the peculiar symptoms that accompanied it? I suspect that viewed from the perspective of the next New Year it will look like a punctuation mark in my life marking one phase of my life to the next. A kind of limbo allowing my brain to reset and preparing me to move on. It may, unlikely as it seems at this moment, even to turn out to be something that I see as having been a positive experience, a kind of winter before a spring.