'The almond eyes I spent years wishing were bigger, brighter, longer-lashed? They no longer bother me. I appreciate that I can see, drive, work, play — navigate the world without thinking.'
is a condition that causes paralysis of the muscles on one side of the face. It has visible symptoms , but there are invisible ones too .
When I arrived at the emergency room, the triage nurse all but confirmed my diagnosis when she looked at me compassionately and said, “You do have all the symptoms, yes.” Six hours of waiting later, I’d developed new signs of the neurological disorder. My mouth and tongue burned, and my right ear ached. I tried to drink water from a paper cup but had lost the ability to form a seal with my lips. Vending machine crisps confirmed I was missing my sense of taste.
That is not what happened. The doctor said my diagnosis was definite; I had Bell’s palsy, no doubt about it. My case was initially tagged as grade III but would soon progress to grade IV, which is classed as moderately severe. Grade IV is characterized by"obvious and disfiguring asymmetry" and"incomplete eye closure."In Western medicine, there’s not much you can do to treat Bell’s palsy, probably because the exact cause of it is not fully understood.
So I went back to my life, trying to speak without slurring, forcing myself to eat small amounts of soft, very spicy food , and mourning my ability to drink hot coffee. At my one-week follow-up, my GP noted that my eye wouldn’t close and made me an emergency ophthalmologist appointment. After that, I followed a regimen of hourly eye drops during the day and ointment at night. I wore an eye patch to go outside and taped my eye shut at night to protect my cornea.
Those first two weeks, I only thought about my appearance in relation to how others perceived me. This tracks with what registered psychologisttold me when I reached out to quiz her for this article. “For some people, there might be embarrassment or shame,” she said. “Finding out that little can be done to reverse the effects of Bell's palsy would likely cause feelings of hopelessness, despondence, and anxiety about how people will respond to their altered appearance.
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