August 3, 2008 10:09AM

My Life as a High Beta Stock; Or, Actually, That’s the Good Side of My Face

By Cody Willard

Try to see if I’ll give up
but there wasn’t any luck
it’s a fact, fact of life
that’s the games, games of strife
everything is all in stride

So I’m sailin, well I’m sailin on
Well I’m movin, hey I’m movin on
Sail on, sail on. — Bad Brains

It was one of the best nights of my life. Rebecca and I had just hosted a block party on Wall Street(!) and I was boarding a plane for Milan to see the Italian girl I’d met last year and been chronicling in a series for the Financial Times.

If my life were a stock, it’d be a very high beta stock. Because two weeks later, I was couped up alone with my dog in an empty house upstate, my face half-frozen, sick and lethargic, the Italian girl all but out of the picture, while the show’s on a yacht in the Hamptons. I told my friends at the time that I sure wish I could buy calls on my own life because it sure felt like I had to be putting in a serious bottom.

Ever since I started getting the best of the Lyme Disease and the Bell’s Palsy it was causing, I’ve had tiny, disparate muscles throughout the ride side of my face twitch. It’s just the last couple days that I’ve finally gotten almost all of the control of the right side of my face back. I tell ya’, one of the most fascinating things I learned during this ordeal is how much I communicate with facial expression. I, like most people, must have a facial expression that I combine with a particular body language to communicate all kinds of things to people constantly. And having a semi-, even mostly-working face threw my ability to communicate into a total funk during the last couple month.

The other rather fascinating thing that I’ve learned from my battle with Bell’s Palsy is how much the stress and tension I carry in the muscles around my eyes age me. Everybody thinks it’s the left side of my face that’s the problem, because the left eye has tended to be slightly smaller in diameter than the right eye. Wonder how much energy I waste every minute of every waking moment squinting my eyes in tension. Wish I could let things go better…whatever those things I carry around in my face are. And no wonder I have so many crinks and knots in my back and shoulders all the time. I gotta let things go. (And wouldn’t a Zen master tell me that I need to let go of letting go?)

I got lucky when I got Bell’s Palsy because it made me go to the doctor and catch my Lyme Disease early enough that I’m curing it. I got lucky getting Lyme Disease because it forced me for the first time in many years to take some real time off and gave me perspective on my career and my job that I needed. I got lucky that even though I was as sick as a dog while I was in Italy and just didn’t realize it that I didn’t lose control of my face until after I got back on US soil (can you imagine me explaining to the security guards in Italy, France or even the US about how I don’t know why the right side of my face froze suddenly, but that I’m sure it’s no big deal to let me move across the border?). I got lucky that my mom and dad arrived here the day I was diagnosed and sentenced to 30 days of IV antibiotics treatments.

It’s better to be lucky than good, as I’ve often learned in sports, in investing, in dating and in my career. But I’m sick of being lucky. And luck ain’t a long-term strategy no how.

I administered the saline, Ceftriaxone, saline, Heparin, combination one last time today. And then my excellent nurse, Arthur, came by and took that tube out of the vein in my right bicep.

You have any idea how good it felt to scratch where that tube’s been sticking out and the arms been all wrapped up in dressing?

And now I can get back to punching through to new 52 week highs as the fundamentals continue their secular climb.

PS. I have to admit I am getting a chuckle out of quoting Bad Brains on a Fox property website. LOL

–
Cody Willard
Read my blog at http://codywillard.com
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