One Year Since I’ve Had Bell’s Palsy

It was one year today when I woke up for work and felt a strange feeling on the right side of my face. Not thinking anything of it, I sat down at my laptop, like I do every morning and got ready for a remote training I was scheduled to have that day. After the training, I just felt weird. I had also felt weird the night before where I had had chinese food and it not only tasted like nothing but my tongue also had a feeling as if it had been burned. I began brushing my teeth and I noticed my lips felt kind of weird also, as if something in my face was just off. And as I went to gurgle my mouthwash, I couldn’t hold it in my mouth and it just dribbled all over the floor. I tried to form some duck lips in the mirror, but noticed my mouth went to one side. That’s when I knew for scertain, smething was dreadfully wrong.

Fearing I had a stroke in my sleep, I jumped on the subway to downtown Brooklyn and headed to the ER. As the nurse asked what was I in for, I told her, I think I just had a stroke.

I saw 3 doctors who had me do exercises and took my vitals. I found that I also could not keep my right eye closed as the doctor was able to pull my eye lid up with no effort. After a few minutes of deliberation, he came back and told me, you have Bell’s Palsy.

My first thought was what the hell is that. I knew what palsy was but who was Bell and what does he have to do with this? He described it to me and said they don;t know what causes it and my first replied well am I going to be like this forever? And he said, they didn’t know.

He sent me home with some anti-virals along with some eye drops which I picked up the same day. The next few days felt like it was only getting worse. ANd this was timing was terrible becaus eI just had just started my YouTube Gaming channel and I thought to myself, OMG! I can’t go on stream like this! So, that ended my stream not long after I had started it.

As days turned into weeks, only my right eye would tear uncontrollably. Sitting at the computer became a chore because the long my eyes were open, the more it would dry out and torrentially tear for no fuckin reason at all. That lead me to get an eye patch which I became an official pirate for what felt like forever. Chewing was a chose. Soup? yeah, forget about it. I couldn’t move my right nostril

And then just as fast as it had came, I started getting random twitches on the right side of my face slowly started to go back to normal until about the 3rd week it was gone. And I thought to myself, nature plays such cruel jokes.

Today, mot of it is gone but any strong movements to the right side of my face like squinting or rubbing my eye or smurking to the right, the nerve twitches in my face start happening all over again. It’s nothing that you can see but I can fee it and it’s annoying af.

I would say that it left me with a somewhat droopy right eye but as I looked at my pics from years ago, I think my right eye has always been kind of lazy.