Hubby: "Hello all, Just got a call from her and they have decided she has been there long enough and are letting her come home - it is about time! Gads, I am running out of clothes and dishes and the refrigerator is nearly empty. (Actually, I did four loads of laundry on Tuesday and the dishes are all clean, I am really not as helpless as you might expect!) Needless to say she is looking forward to sleeping in her own bed with nobody sticking a thermometer in her mouth every four hours, etc."

Hubby: "Hello all, Just talked to her and she said if her temperature stays down she will be "released" tomorrow."

My sleep wasn't very restful last night, because our new roommate was having weird reactions to her meds. She was hallucinating, and thought she saw a man outside the window walking past. We were on the fifth floor! They drew the curtains around her bed and that helped for couple of hours. Then she was convinced she had to get up and use the bathroom. When she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, her bed alarm would go off and wake us all up! They tried to tell her she had a Foley catheter and didn't need to get up. A short while later, she'd get up again.

Hubby: "Morning all, I found out why she did not call me back - she fell asleep! MRI still scheduled for this morning. They have her on an IV antibiotic. I suspect she will be released once they have the MRI results and confirm the diagnosis. As of yet they have not given her an anti-inflammatory or steroid to treat the nerve inflammation, waiting to make sure it is Bell's or Ramsay Hunt. She said she slept all day yesterday, all last evening and all night!"

This has been quite a day! I woke up in the wee hours, about 1:30 A.M., and headed down the hall to the bathroom. My right eye was sore and something felt strange about my upper lip, so I turned on the light, looked in the mirror, and got the shock of my life! I looked like I had put on my Halloween mask early! Facial palsy was well advanced at this point: my eyelid hardly moved at all, the corner of my mouth drooped dramatically, and even my nose was crooked.

When I woke up this morning, I noticed that my scratchy throat was gone, but I was much dizzier, my ear was really painful, and the swelling and soreness had spread down into the side of my neck! The dizziness was not at all like the vertigo I've experienced in the past. Well, no sense in going home early, since we planned to leave in the early afternoon anyway, so we stayed for the last two workshops, and left right after lunch. By that time, my ear was quite painful, the swelling was looking a bit like the mumps, and I couldn’t walk a straight line!

At breakfast, I noticed that my right ear felt a little plugged up and I had a little soreness and swelling in the cheek in front of that ear. Great, my always-tender saliva glands are swelling in response to the oncoming cold... this cold will be a bad one! Later, at the Saturday morning workshop, I noticed that I was a bit light-headed, but this could be the normal slight vertigo I get every time my ears block up a bit.

Ma had insisted on being there for the two days the clean-out guys were working. She shouldn’t have done it; it was very traumatic for her. Thank God she and my sister left today for the drive to Florida! I plan to go by the house one more time when we got back from our weekend, to make sure the guys cleaned up after themselves and run a vacuum over the rugs.

This morning I noticed a place in the fold behind my right ear that's painful to the touch, as though a pimple is developing there. I ignored it, did a mountain of laundry, and packed for our weekend. We feel we've truly earned some time away!

I woke up today with a sore scalp on the right side, as though someone had pulled my hair, hard... it felt like my hair hurt! I didn’t pay much attention, since my hair is very long and I assumed it had caught under the pillow, or under hubby’s head and been pulled over a long period of time while I slept. The scalp pain gradually lessened over the next several days.