Compensations

On Halloween I received my settlement cheque--connections, anyone?--and since then I've been buying things to improve my day to day life, including a new, powerful eco-radiator for my used-to-be-cold flat, new glasses, membership in the university teachers' union (which I'd been wanting since I began at Bath Spa), a microwave, Circulon 2 saucepans to complete my cookware collection (actually my first settlement purchase--I bet you didn't think I was that domestic), etc., as well as taking out to dinner those who stood by me through the injury itself--Matt (and so I need to treat Claire soon, too)--as well as friends who supported me through the suit &c., such as Alan Summers and Karen Hoy.

I'd still rather have my left jaw normal, but in lieu of that, I'm enjoying a sense of the improved ease and quality of my everyday life. That eco-radiator has, at long last, made it comfortable to be in my bakehouse flat in cold weather, and that truly makes each day better. I also decided for my trip to Berlin this weekend for the Poetry Hearings Festival to forego Easyjet for an airline that would neither try to sell to me throughout the flight nor nickel-and-dime me for such things as hold luggage, etc.

Small pleasures.

Settled at last

I've just received the settlement cheque for my jaw injury--or, to use the legal term, dental negligence. I feel elated and relieved--mostly the latter. The validation of it means a lot to me.

Losing Face

After nearly four years, my lingual nerve injury seems to have become a little worse, with a new symptom. While my left chin/lower jaw feels numb and pained to varying degrees all the time, the last two nights the numbness has radiated over much of the rest of my face. Have you ever had an itch underneath thick fabric, like jeans, so when you scratch you feel the pressure, but not the sharpness? That is how this feels, like my whole face (especially lower) is coming off of a shot of novocaine. It lasted an hour or so last night, and it began again about ten minutes ago. Maybe it has something to do with fatigue, as I've also been ill? The maxillofacial surgeons I saw in London this summer told me about the erratic behaviour of injured nerves (sometimes, for example, I feel pain in the opposite jaw; sometimes, for no apparent reason, the pain becomes very sharp), but this is something new entirely.

I'm posting this because I have been working off and on on an essay about my injury and its many varied effects on my life, as I go about and hardly anyone knows what I'm experiencing. That feels strange to a person so given to expression and expressiveness. I wish people could see it somehow, some twinge in the skin or the like; its invisibility upsets me more than I can explain--and so my desire to try to write about it.