What Happened To My Face

If you have looked at any of my pictures, it is probably obvious to you that I am a smoker. And yes, I do know the health risks involved. Not only does smoking cause cancer, emphysema, heart disease, and on and on and on, but it prematurely ages the skin. It causes all of those little wrinkles around the mouth.

This morning when I was having my coffee and cigarettes, psyching myself up to do my exercises, I was watching myself in the mirror. I finally admitted something to myself that I feel I need to post here.

I believe my cigarette addiction is a major contributing factor to my mouth pulling to the right and causing it to be off centered.

Since the left side of my face is the weaker side, I chew on the right, including gum, and without realizing it until today, I smoke on the right side. I tried to switch to the left side, but I had trouble holding a  cigarette on the left without using my hand.

For the last couple of weeks when doing my exercises, I have tried to be more aware of the weakness on the left side and work that side a little harder. There isn’t any visible change yet, but I can feel that I am working the left side muscles more. And that’s a good feeling.

Last February on Valentine’s Day, I was able to quit smoking with the help of Chantix. I was smoke free for two months. Then I got a phone call from my stepMom. My Dad has emphysema and pulmonary fibrosis and had been hospitalized with pneumonia. When the doctors said that all they could do was to make him comfortable, my stepMom said I needed to get there as soon as possible. Within three and a half hours time, I was on the road, headed south. It was pouring down rain, thunder and lightening,  and getting dark, not to mention that I had gotten up early that morning and ran errands and did house work all day. I didn’t know exactly where I was going since they had moved to a different town since my last visit. All I knew was I had 800 miles ahead of me, just me and my dog. I was weak. I had four packs of cigarettes left in the frig and I grabbed them on my way out the door.

My Dad did come home from the hospital but he is on oxygen all of the time now. And yes, he smoked for years, non-filtered Camels. His health is failing fast and I expect I will be getting another one of those phone calls in the near future.

I am working on making up my mind to quit again. I am tired of the hacking cough every morning and being out of breath when I walk up the hill to the mailbox. I will quit again, soon. Maybe when I quit, I will see more benefit from the face exercises.

Four weeks of faithfully doing my face exercises and I can see absolutely NO IMPROVEMENT in my droopy mouth. But I am not going to get discouraged, not yet anyway. I do realize that it tooks years for my face to get in this shape and it will take more than just a few weeks of exercise to see any change.

These two pictures were taken about six weeks apart at approximately the same time of day. The September picture was taken before I started exercising and the October picture was taken after my first four weeks of exercise.

Look at my left eye. Is it my imagination? Or maybe it is the brightness of the sunlight.

I HATE these pictures! But I have to remember that I was purposely trying not to have an expression!

My computer needed to be defragged today so I clicked all the little buttons and started the process in motion. Hmm…. isn’t it ashamed that I can’t defrag my face.

• ANALYZE:  BEYOND REPAIR - LONG OVERDUE
• FRAGMENTED:  That would be all the short little lines scattered all over. I need a DELETE button for those. I sure don’t want them all put together!
• CONTIGUOUS:  That must be the long lines running from my nose to the corners of my mouth. 
• FREE SPACE:  There isn’t much of that left.
• UNMOVABLE:  That would be my mouth, nose, and eyes. It’s too bad I can’t rearrange my mouth.

I know I’m dreaming. But wouldn’t it be something if there was a USB cable that you could plug into your head so you could upload your face to the computer. After you defrag your face you could open it with your favorite graphics program and finish fixing all of the things you don’t like about your appearance. How cool would that be? Then there could be another cable to transfer the results back to your face, like transferring files from one computer to another. LOL! I’m still dreaming. I think my alarm clock is going off.

When I was doing my face exercises this morning and looking at the knot in the middle of my nose, I couldn’t help but wonder if having my nose smashed all over my face has anything to do with my crooked appearance.

When I was a kid, about six or seven years old, my Dad and stepmom were at the neighbor’s house, in the back yard playing around with golf clubs. They didn’t want any of the kids in the way so we were given a wood iron and a couple of golf balls and told to go play in the front yard.

We had no idea how to swing a club properly, all we could do was argue over who got to have their turn first. I don’t remember who won the argument but I do remember all of us standing there waiting for Ruby, the oldest and biggest of our little group, to hurry up so we could have a turn at trying to hit that obnoxious little white ball.

Ruby swung that golf club as if it were a baseball bat, with enough force to knock the ball out of the park. But she didn’t hit the ball. She swung that club so hard that is spun her around and the club hit me in the face, right square in the nose. I remember trying to scream but I couldn’t cause I couldn’t catch my breath. When I finally did breathe, the screams wouldn’t stop and neither did the blood.

The next thing I remember was riding in the backseat of the police car with my stepmom, sirens blaring, enroute to the hospital. It was kind of funny when my Dad arrived at the hospital before we did.

My nose was huge and splattered all over my face. There was nothing they could do until the swelling went down. So, about two weeks later, on my birthday, I was admitted to the hospital to have my nose rebroke and set. I was a pitiful looking mess. This white contraption was convering my nose, held in place with white adhesive tape that went from cheek to cheek and across my forehead. And I had two big black eyes!

Eventually my nose healed, although it was extremely sensitive for quite some time. But I wonder if during the healing process it healed “crooked”.

To this day, I have no desire to learn to play golf.

The muscles on one side of my face do not move with the muscles on the other side so I feel that I should extend Phase I, the learning phase of Carolyn’s Facial Fitness. This phase is done sitting up in front of a mirror.

Let me explain. One of the exercises requires that you put your index finger of each hand above each eyebrow, resting the entire finger across the top of each eyebrow. You push down with the index fingers while raising the eyebrows. I have noticed that even though it feels like my right eyebrow is being lifted, it isn’t lifting near as much as the left. If I concentrate and watch myself in the mirror, I can make the right eyebrow go higher. When I first noticed the difference, I thought it was because the left eyebrow is naturally higher than the right. But I have noticed other areas of my face that react the same as my eyebrows. 

 As with any exercise program, sometimes you have to modify the exercise depending on your ability to successfully complete the moves without injury. I will be modifying my exercise program by extending Phase I until I feel confident that I am doing the exercises to the best of my ability.

This quote from Over Coffee… made me ask myself the same question.

What is my bold? I asked me.

• In Pilates, bold means reaching further, standing taller, stretching beyond myself.
• Bold is drama, strong color, size of brush stroke on canvas…
• It’s running ahead on the trail to be first to discover what’s around the bend…
• It’s publicly declaring my intentions, my goals, my purpose, holding myself accountable to all who hear…
• And sometimes, for me, it’s as simple as exploring something different.

Although Over Coffee… deals with art and the artist’s thoughts, I asked myself the same question.

What is my bold? It is…

• Putting pictures of myself here for anyone to see.
• Knowing that I may be setting myself up for derogatory comments.
• Hoping for words of encouragement.
• Not accepting that I have to live the rest of my life looking this way, becoming worse with age.
• Making an effort to publicly change my appearance. 

When I am doing my face exercises I am reminded of the old TV show, “I Love Lucy”. Some of her situations and expressons are priceless.

My exercise pictures aren’t priceless, not even close. In fact, a more suitable term would be “ridiculous”. This is just a few of the many expressions obtained doing the exercises. I will never let anyone see me doing them all.

I don’t think you can imagine how difficult it was for me to put these pictures here. I feel naked without makeup.

My eye symptoms are similiar to the symptoms listed in the Bell’s Palsy Information Site.

Eye closure difficult or impossible
Lack of tears
Excessive tearing
Brow droop
Tears fail to coat cornea
Lower eyelid droop
Sensitivity to light

I have been told that I sleep with my eyes open quite often and it must be true because I have actually scratched my eyeball with the comforter or the sheet on the bed. My eye was severely scratched and I had to go to the emergency room for treatment which included having to wear a patch until my eyeball healed.

My eyes are extremely dry and when I try to wear contacts, they stick to my eyeball. I have also had just the opposite happen. When I put the contacts in, my eyes are too dry for them to stay in place and they fall out. I invested a small fortune in every wetting solution available but none of them helped.

If you have looked at the pictures of me, you can see the difference in my eyebrows. The difference seems to be getting worse with age.

I don’t know if tears coat the cornea. I would think they don’t because my eyes stay so dry all of the time. If there is much of a breeze blowing, I can hardly stand to be outside because I can almost be guaranteed that it will blow dirt into my eyes. Having to wear glasses is actually a good thing because they provide a degree of protection from the elements.

The difference in my lower eyelids was never obvious to me until I examined the pictures of myself on the computer.

My eyes are sensitive to light but I think that a lot of people have issues with bright light.

There are number of other conditions that can cause symptoms similar to Bell’s Palsy. I suppose I will never know what is was.

Today was my fifth consecutive day of face exercise; now it is time for a two day break in the routine. There is still a slight bit of soreness, mainly in the cheek area, but it isn’t uncomfortable enough to make me give up. It may sound strange, but the soreness actually feels good.

I still feel awkward with some of the exercises but each day seemed to go a bit smoother than the previous day. Learning to apply the correct amount of pressure is one of the most challenging aspects of the exercises. The bruising under the corners of my mouth was gone within two days but I did manage to get another small bruise near the corner of my eye that lasted for one day.

I am still convinced that if exercise can reshape your body, it has to do something for your face. My hope is that it will be the right something. According to a post on Guide Skin Care Beautiful:

Facial exercises help to keep everything looking as it did when you were younger by tightening the muscles, which then in turn help to gently encourage the skin to follow suit. This can mean less wrinkles as well as the disappearance of loose or sagging skin, and a generally more toned and youthful look to your facial skin.

My main purpose is to attempt to correct my smile. If I get the added benefit of reducing wrinkles and sagging skin, that will be fantastic!

The first day of the month seemed like a good time to start learning the 28 exercises in part one of Carolyn’s exercise program but I am a day late getting started. Part one is the learning phase and you do these sitting up. Carolyn says it will take three days to two weeks to memorize all the exercises.

The exercises are more intense than I anticipated and I felt very awkward. I may have applied too much pressure on my face because I immediately had some bruising, although I bruise quite easily.

This is bruising below the corners of my mouth.

The DVD will play on my computer and I use the mouse to select the controls or I can play it on the DVD player and use the remote to make the selections.

This is my workout area.

My plan is to make the exercises part of my morning routine since they are suppose to be done at the same time every day for five days straight, then rest your face for two days. This may sound strange but my face actually feels “sore”, just like my body would feel if I would take the time to do a regular body workout.