Remembering the fondest memory of 2011... with a smile

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Gordon Sinclair Jr.'s favourite moment of 2011: Snapping this photo and seeing Athina smile again. (GORDON SINCLAIR JR. / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS)

I was doing one of my favourite things Friday -- walking in Assiniboine Park with my wife, Athina, and our pooch, Tate -- when the question was raised.

"What was your fondest moment of the year?" I asked Athina.

Her five-word answer brought back my own fondest moment of 2011; the one I captured in a photograph last summer on another walk. A moment that meant even more because of what Athina -- like so many people who struggled last year with health problems -- has been through.

-- -- --

It was a couple of days after Valentine's Day when the symptoms started.

"Will you look in my ear," Athina asked as she was packing for a business trip the next morning to Toronto.

She had a pain in her left ear. I couldn't see the rash that, if it wasn't already there, would develop later.

There were other symptoms. Her mouth was feeling strange and her left eye was dry.

"But you go into denial," she would say later. "You don't want to be sick."

Her denial was all but gone by the time her flight touched down at Pearson International Airport and she found herself in the washroom, looking in the mirror and seeing someone who didn't look like her anymore.

The left side of her face, and her mouth, was drooping, as if she had suffered a stroke. It wasn't a stroke. Or any other life-threatening disease. But the impact of what she did have would carry its own physical and emotional weight. By then she couldn't close her left eye.

At the downtown King Edward Hotel, the doorman looked her in the face and gently suggested he would get her another cab. St. Michael's Hospital was nearby. They took her quickly in emergency and, after the initial doctor couldn't diagnose what was wrong, another stepped forward who knew exactly what was happening. He told her she had a rare form of shingles called Ramsay Hunt syndrome that, in her case, affected her seventh and eighth cranial nerves.

Athina needed to be treated with an anti-viral medication and the drug prednisone within 72 hours of the symptoms' onset if she were to have a reasonable chance of recovering. The hospital didn't stock the expensive anti-viral drug, so Athina had to find a pharmacy. Perhaps still wanting to believe she was OK, she walked back to the hotel. That night she attended an awards dinner, with her hanging face, and the eye that wouldn't close. She could feel people's discomfort.

At the airport for the flight home she found an out-of-the-way corner in Air Canada's Maple Leaf Lounge. As she left the lounge she recognized Hockey Night in Canada's Don Cherry and Ron MacLean. She would be impressed by MacLean's polite, gracious manner as he held the elevator, and equally unimpressed by Cherry's indifference to the point of seeming rude. Or maybe it was her own hyper-sensitivity to feeling so obviously disfigured and afraid.

The flight home gave her time to think about what her body was telling her. Eating was uncomfortable because of her drooping mouth and her diminished sense of taste. Her hearing had become acutely loud, and every so often she had to put drops in her unblinking left eye or risk damaging and losing her cornea.

She pondered her life if she didn't recover. Which of her impaired senses would she miss the most. Her hearing? Her sight? Her sense of taste? And then there was the paralysis. She couldn't even smile.

Not that she had anything to smile about; not even the hope that doctors might have caught the resurgence of her dormant childhood chicken-pox virus in time to save her face.

Back in Winnipeg, she googled Ramsay Hunt syndrome and read story after story from people, all over North America, some of whom never recovered. Nevertheless, her own doctor remained encouraged. She would need to take some time off work. Rest. And hope for the best.

During the months that followed, Athina was stoic about the pain she was feeling in her face, the ringing in her ear and her loss of balance.

But ever so gradually over the course of about two months, when she looked in the mirror her face began to return to normal. Yet, nearly a year later, she still struggles with her balance, the pain in her face when she touches it a certain way, and the ringing in her ear when she's tired.

-- -- --

Which brings us back to walking in Assiniboine Park on Friday and my question to Athina.

"What was your fondest moment of the year?"

And her five-word answer.

"Being able to smile again," she said.

A little further along the trail, after she told me how important it is to have someone who will just listen, someone with whom she could share the pain and the fear, Athina asked me a question.

"What's your fondest moment?"

It was taking the photo I framed and gave to her for Christmas. The one from her last summer, showing her feeding a bird that had landed in her outstretched hand. It was my favourite moment, I told her, because she looked so beautiful, happy and at peace. And, of course, for a more obvious reason.

She could smile again.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 31, 2011 A5