Month: February 2025

Just had my second session today

It’s bothered me since I had my stroke a decade ago, and I’m finally treating the cause. I’ve had mild facial paralysis on the left side of my face, and the left side sits a little lower than the right.

Last month, a place in my city on Vancouver Island finally got an Emface machine. It’s the first one on the island and I’ve been waiting for it for the past few years.

Emface treats your facial muscles. As a matter of fact, it’s been used for Bell’s Palsy patients with great results for several years now, and I was very encouraged by this fact. Because my facial paralysis is mild, I’ve been hoping that this machine will work for me.

Here’s a short video of how it worked on a Bell’s Palsy patient who had been suffering for 2 years with a far more lopsided face than what I have.

https://youtube.com/shorts/43so60ZSTQ8?si=yxJs7uhjpvN0889Y

While I understand that facial paralysis from a stroke and facial paralysis from Bell’s Palsy are very different things, immediately after my second session, my smile is already more even,and my left eye is closer to the right eye as far as where it’s sitting on my face.  Once I’ve had my fourth and final session, I will post my results here. It should be noted that you can set the machine at different strengths on either side of your face. I’m getting 100% on my left side and 50%  on my right

It’s a very comfortable treatment that feels like a warm massage, and I feel muscles moving that haven’t moved in almost ten years. I’m not using it to look younger but to look more symmetrical. Because it’s not fun being lopsided.

My grandmother’s advice for women starting a new job

If your boss is a man, do what you can to befriend his wife. It will give you leverage, especially if he tries anything sexual. Don’t trust HR to do their job of protecting you in a case of sexual harassment. A friendship with the bosses wife is much more effective to hold over his head.

Patriotic?

Are you patriotic? What does being patriotic mean to you?

Not really. Im proud of my country when it’s deserved and disappointed in it when deserved. Patriotism leads to the us vs. them mentality, in reality, we should be teaming together, not against each other. We should be border free and understand that marking territory is nonsense. The First Nations people are closer to the cooperation that is necessary for us as a species to survive and thrive. We waste our time fighting one another when we should be helping each other. After all, the earth is OUR planet, and we should be taking care of it because it’s the only one we have. If we all band together with our focus on bringing the planet back to health, imagine what we can accomplish. Leave our egos and our pride behind us, and stop living like parasites trying to kill our host and each other.

At sixty

What were your parents doing at your age?

My parents were already retired and about to embark upon a decade worth of travel mostly to New Zealand, where they would eventually spend their winters .

This is the year I turn 60, and unlike my parents, the year I realize that plane travel is not likely to happen again . There will be no cruises as I have horrible motion sickness. The most I can hope for is a car trip or two, and it’s hard to get excited about that . I’m very lucky to live where I do, but I’ve always had wanderlust that will now have to go unsated. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see all of the places I wanted to before becoming disabled, and that’s just another disappointment I will have to deal with.

The reality is that I’m more disabled than I think I am, and while I’m still seeing small improvements, they aren’t things that change how much energy I can expend daily without becoming exhausted. Even a trip to Vancouver needs a full day of recovery before we get out in the city.  The 90-minute ferry ride over takes that much out of me.

So I’m just going to have to learn to enjoy seeing the occasional show,having dinners out from time to time,and a car trip to places I’ve seen too many times already.

The good news is that I can focus on writing, one of the only joys that my stroke didn’t take from me.  Because if I’m not living in the solution, I’m not living.

Crime and punishment

If you had the power to change one law, what would it be and why?

I live in Canada, and the one thing I would change is how violent criminals are punished. For example, if you assault someone, you get assaulted. If you rape someone, you get raped. If you torture someone, you get tortured, and if you kill someone, you get killed in the exact same way. We need to stop coddling violent offenders.