Last night, while my husband and I watched a movie, a muscle twitched in my neck. I had been cross-stitching for hours that day, and had reviewed a bunch of residency submissions too, and in any case my neck is, let us say, not of the spring chicken variety. But because I couldn't easily identify whatever the phenomenon was that caused my neck to feel weird, I began to worry, and then feel certain, that I had a blood clot traveling slowly northward and it would lead to a stroke.
Soon, my neck twitched and stuck for longer than a moment, such that I could put my fingers on the area. It was definitely a muscle spasm (a weird one), not at all a blood clot. Much more like an eye twitch, although I've never had a spasm in any muscle that wasn't on my face, and I've never known a muscle spasm to stick that way, briefly, like the old wives warn us about our faces.
But I had already put in the worry about the stroke. My blood pressure had already inched that iota higher. My stability about waking up alive the next morning had been shaken. I felt relief, but things were not the same as they had been.
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