This morning — before I’d made it through my first cup of tea — I opened an alarming e-mail from FOX News slugged: “Breaking News for You — Botox May Move from Face to Brain.” Swell.

It took me years to get past my fear of injecting a deadly poison (one that paralyzes muscles and is in fact supposed to do so) between my eyes, but I got over it and now I no longer have to dig foundation out of the deep, deep creases that once graced my forehead. My mother is still convinced I’m going to go blind one day and I did see an unfortunate woman at the John Barrett salon recently whom I thought had some sort of terrible palsy or worse, and then I was told she was a victim of Botox gone wrong. And now this.

According to Fox, studies tested on rat whiskers confirmed that “within three days of the injection, remnants of a protein were found broken down by the toxin in an area of the brainstem.” Further research will now be conducted to better understand how the toxins spread along nerves.

Well, until then, I’m taking my shots. I used to have a crevice between my eyes that isn’t even there when the Botox wears off anymore — the muscles have been trained not to execute my (former) trademark skeptical look. So far, the worst thing that has happened to me was that the ends of my eyebrows looked like little wings, but the trick is to get someone really good to do it. In New York I recommend Dr. Lisa Airan, an excellent dermatologist, or Dr. Haideh Hirmand, a really gifted plastic surgeon and one of the very few top females in her field. Haideh is a dream — while I remain stubbornly (and perhaps unrealistically) insistent that I’ll never go under the knife, she’s my girl if I change my mind.