Bell's Palsy is truly one of those things that just suddenly fuck you over. I was 16 when I called my mom from high school and said "hey, don't panic, but half my face is paralyzed". In retrospect, this was probably not the best way to do it. Food ? Slides out of your mouth. Spit ? Goddamnit, slides out too. I took the reasonable option of still going to school, as a high schooler. Bold move, but thankfully, noone was a dick about it. Best way around this whole situation was to laugh about it anyways. For what reason did it happen ? None, same as the article. Just popped in one day. It took 3 months to come back to mostly normal, so it was pretty short for me, thankfully, but the sudden onset can just... happen. Doctors were thinking of some herpes causing an inflammation and pressing against the nerve, but it can be literally anything, and even better, it can come back at any time. Just a stroke of bad luck. As of today, I'm back at almost 100%, but I still feel that muscles on one side of the face are just this little bit less strong than the other side.
Life without being able to blink just one of your eyes is a frustrating one. Sleeping with an eye patch might make you feel like a pirate for a few weeks, but dear god the dryness. Your face ends up overcompensating, naturally. Can't feel yourself smiling on one side ? Clearly that's because your muscles aren't going hard enough, so go on, make them work HARDER. The one side that was smiling looked more like a goblin than anything else really.
Being told I maybe had face herpes was truly a highlight in my life due do how out of the blue and unlikely it sounded.
I experienced Bell's Palsy for about a week and being told by the doctor it might never recover was.... well, quite frankly terrifying. For some unknown reason I woke up one day and it was gone. We've had a few mental glitches in the family over the years so put it down to genetics.
My mother suffers from this, and has for over a year now. It’s had serious effects on her mental health, self image, and in some cases daily functioning. In her case it has improved, but it has not resolved itself and probably never fully will at this point.
I won’t say what its onset coincided with though (you can figure it out).
I had Bell's Palsy back in August. Even though most people fully recover, it's very difficult to feel any optimism when you're looking in the mirror and your face can't move at all.
Thankfully, I do now seem to have just about fully recovered. I started getting tiny movements back around 3 weeks and by 6 weeks it was substantially improved. By day 33 I regained the ability to fully close my affected eye, and some time thereafter normal blinking resumed. Today, only yawning continues to feel like I have weird asymmetric facial pressures.
It is emotionally scarring though. I'm still less socially outgoing than I was before, and I now live in the constant fear that it could happen again. The slightest tingle in my ear has me racing to take anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).
Same for me. I had it back in early 2018 also with similar time scales. It was a horrible time, but have fully recovered now and not had any issues since. Luckily it's (apparently) not one of those things that recurs once you've had it. That's not to say we won't get it again for some reason, but it's nice to know it isn't an ongoing condition.
I am glad I (and you guys) got off relatively lightly with it. It can affect people for a lot, lot longer.
> Luckily it's (apparently) not one of those things that recurs once you've had it.
Reading on /r/bellspalsy gave me the impression that people seem to frequently get it multiple times, but the place I went for facial rehabilitation told me in their experience it's very rare to get it a second time (but it can happen).
I had it this year as well. Acupuncture helped with the nerve pain and the doctor diagnosed it as bells due to Lyme disease. Acupuncturist said when he was in China they'd diagnose bells palsy as lyme if it presents I'm fall.
The immune reaction to SARS-CoV-2 tends to happen at the boundary where the immune system encounters the pathogen (your mucosa, and the respiratory epithelium, where T cells and Natural killer cells hang out), but the immune reaction to the vaccines can happen in the muscle in your arm or in any other part of your body that the vaccine's components (eg. mRNA, lipid nanoparticles) or its products (eg. modified spike proteins) subsequently travel to and concentrate in, so we'd expect to see autoimmune disorders that affect things like the nervous system in weird and wonderful ways being caused by the vaccines in a way that we wouldn't expect to see being caused by the adaptive immune system.
Covid gets in your blood and causes systemic issues all over your body. Remember “covid toe” early on in the pandemic? Nevertheless, the facial rehabilitation facility I went to (that now works exclusively with Bell’s palsy patients) has seen a significant uptick in cases immediately following a covid infection.
Severe Covid can have systemic effects (as can a lot of viruses), but mild and asymptomatic cases (in which people are developing T cell immunity following proximity to a person who has been infected, without the need for antibodies) typically aren't, because the immune system is functioning properly and presenting an effective barrier to the virus at the epithelium and preventing the disease from progressing to viraemia.
Our immune systems have great methods for stopping the progress of pathogens at natural entry points, but this protection is circumvented when substances are injected into people's muscles, and a varying proportion of them (depending on whether the vaccinator hits a blood vessel) then enters the bloodstream.
It would be interesting to see how many of the patients at your facility had severe cases of Covid and how many had also been vaccinated; of course it's difficult to make comparisons (as I'm sure you're aware) when "Unvaccinated" status lasts until the 14th day post-injection.
I had Bell’s in 2015. Got home from a week in SF. Cracked open one of the bottles of wine I bought while in Napa and was really upset with how bad it tasted compared to how it tasted while at the winery. The next morning it was already having its way with me.
I never felt so self conscious and helpless in my life. It destroyed my voice (it was so gravely it made Tom Waits sound like a non-smoker), got multiple eye infections because I couldn’t close one of my eyes naturally, food would fall out of one side of my mouth while chewing, sealing took major work.
It took almost a year and half to recover. It left its mark. My one eye starts to droop if I pull a late night coding session or am feeling worn out. Always there to remind me of the worst year and a half of my life.
Man, I had Bell's palsy in 8th grade. It lasted for about two months.
Middle school is no place to be a fat kid, but it turns out it's really not the place to be the fat kid with a drooping mouth and an eye patch.
I got about 95% of my face back, I'm 40 and if you watch me smile or blink there's a noticeable delay between the left and right sides of my face.
My cousin has had it twice as an adult, the second time left her at about 60%, which has been pretty hard on her.
The fact that people judge appearances first, because it is unpreventable and incurable I'd give it 1 out of 10 stars.
I had it over 20 years ago, and Dr. Google wasn't what it is now. So when it came on, I was left wondering "WTF? Is it a stroke?" I sympathize with the author to some extent, though it seems the change to her appearance hit her much harder than it did myself. I've got most functionality back, but still have a crooked smile. Meh, adds character, I guess. I found out the hard way that my bagpipe career will never get off the ground, as I can't seal my mouth well enough to blow ($35 for that practice chanter I'll never get back). Can't whistle anymore, either (no great loss there). One eye has a hard time closing as tightly as the other, but I can still wear contacts so it doesn't have any practical bad outcomes.
Treatment might have changed over the years, but the prednisone I was given really layed on the depression. Make note of that should you get a case, and prednisone is prescribed: you're depressed because of the high dose of steroids, not the fact that your face is all crooked. Prednisone didn't seem to do any good anyway.
I guess I'm rambling to say that if you wake up one day and half your face doesn't work, and assuming it's not a stroke or something, it won't kill you. It'll get mostly better, but your face might have some added "character" when it's over. But mostly: no one will notice more than you do, so quit worrying about it. Most people I meet, when told, have no idea. My wife notices when I get tired (eye droops a bit). And now you have a story about the day you thought you were having a stroke.
24 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 45.8 ms ] threadLife without being able to blink just one of your eyes is a frustrating one. Sleeping with an eye patch might make you feel like a pirate for a few weeks, but dear god the dryness. Your face ends up overcompensating, naturally. Can't feel yourself smiling on one side ? Clearly that's because your muscles aren't going hard enough, so go on, make them work HARDER. The one side that was smiling looked more like a goblin than anything else really.
Being told I maybe had face herpes was truly a highlight in my life due do how out of the blue and unlikely it sounded.
I think she still has some asymmetry due to it 30 years on.
I won’t say what its onset coincided with though (you can figure it out).
Thankfully, I do now seem to have just about fully recovered. I started getting tiny movements back around 3 weeks and by 6 weeks it was substantially improved. By day 33 I regained the ability to fully close my affected eye, and some time thereafter normal blinking resumed. Today, only yawning continues to feel like I have weird asymmetric facial pressures.
It is emotionally scarring though. I'm still less socially outgoing than I was before, and I now live in the constant fear that it could happen again. The slightest tingle in my ear has me racing to take anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).
Hasn't returned after about 12 years, and can laugh/joke about it now.
I am glad I (and you guys) got off relatively lightly with it. It can affect people for a lot, lot longer.
Reading on /r/bellspalsy gave me the impression that people seem to frequently get it multiple times, but the place I went for facial rehabilitation told me in their experience it's very rare to get it a second time (but it can happen).
https://gprivate.com/61ffh
oh boy that L looks sexy.
Our immune systems have great methods for stopping the progress of pathogens at natural entry points, but this protection is circumvented when substances are injected into people's muscles, and a varying proportion of them (depending on whether the vaccinator hits a blood vessel) then enters the bloodstream.
It would be interesting to see how many of the patients at your facility had severe cases of Covid and how many had also been vaccinated; of course it's difficult to make comparisons (as I'm sure you're aware) when "Unvaccinated" status lasts until the 14th day post-injection.
I never felt so self conscious and helpless in my life. It destroyed my voice (it was so gravely it made Tom Waits sound like a non-smoker), got multiple eye infections because I couldn’t close one of my eyes naturally, food would fall out of one side of my mouth while chewing, sealing took major work.
It took almost a year and half to recover. It left its mark. My one eye starts to droop if I pull a late night coding session or am feeling worn out. Always there to remind me of the worst year and a half of my life.
My cousin has had it twice as an adult, the second time left her at about 60%, which has been pretty hard on her.
The fact that people judge appearances first, because it is unpreventable and incurable I'd give it 1 out of 10 stars.
Do you know if her occurrences were on opposites sides of the face or the same side both times?
Treatment might have changed over the years, but the prednisone I was given really layed on the depression. Make note of that should you get a case, and prednisone is prescribed: you're depressed because of the high dose of steroids, not the fact that your face is all crooked. Prednisone didn't seem to do any good anyway.
I guess I'm rambling to say that if you wake up one day and half your face doesn't work, and assuming it's not a stroke or something, it won't kill you. It'll get mostly better, but your face might have some added "character" when it's over. But mostly: no one will notice more than you do, so quit worrying about it. Most people I meet, when told, have no idea. My wife notices when I get tired (eye droops a bit). And now you have a story about the day you thought you were having a stroke.
The treatment is the same today: prednisone.
> you're depressed because of the high dose of steroids, not the fact that your face is all crooked
I was definitely depressed because my face was crooked :\ That said, I wasn't all that depressed, but I was pretty worried.