I ate some chicken. It doesn’t matter WHOSE chicken, or where, probably ANY chicken would have done it. (A few months ago the water went off here – smelled of chemicals, badly. I’ve been having severe allergic reactions ever since. Necessary backstory, I suppose.)

Somewhere  in the middle of the night I wake, and my lips feel funny. Sorta like the novacaine is wearing off, only fat and puffy. It happens sometimes, and it is never even. Various parts of my face swell up and itch – it isn’t hives, this is LOTS of swelling, and a little bit of itch. It hits one side of my lips (never the same one twice in a row), one side of the top lip, sometimes the other side of the bottom lip, sometimes my chin, sometimes my cheeks, occasionally under my eyes.

This time it is everything. But not on both sides. One side has more than the other, and it isn’t balanced at all.

I look like a dog.

A sad dog.

A St. Bernard.

I’m not quite drooling. Small blessings.

I take the Zyrtec. It isn’t quite up to it.

Oddly I can breathe through my nose for the rest of the night. The swelling doesn’t go down, but it doesn’t go up either. It does not progress to congestion and severe asthma. But my whole face has lumps and distortions.

I wake in the morning and it is still very swollen. I know how this one goes, as I move my face, the swelling will go down. Takes about an hour. This time it takes three… four. Geez. After about two hours I still looked like I had Bell’s Palsy on one side, sorta saggy. It isn’t that my face is saggy, more like there just isn’t room for it all up higher.

My lip still doesn’t FEEL normal, but my upper lip on the left, the last place to resolve, is finally NOT looking like a middle aged man who just shaved for the first time in 10 years and everybody can see how much his lip has grown.

I’m no longer a St. Bernard though. So that’s good.