One year on, the BBC's Shanghai correspondent John Sudworth reports on his slow recovery from Bell's palsy, and frowns, almost symmetrically, at the lack of medical awareness about the condition.
It may have taken a whole year, but the muscles on the left hand side of my face have been slowly drifting away from the picket line and getting themselves back to work. The strike, it seems, is over.
My left eyebrow, the left side of my mouth and my left eyelid have all reported for duty again and I can now do two of the most glorious and underrated things a human can do - smile and blink.
Shortly after the onset of my Bell's palsy, in October last year, I wrote about my decision to carry on working as a BBC TV reporter. The response was overwhelming, with many, many fellow sufferers writing to tell me about their experience coping with this facially disfiguring and deeply distressing condition
Bell's palsy sufferers usually find themselves becoming overnight - and unwitting - members of a very strange club. There are no warning signs and most people simply wake to find that they can't move half of their face.
Bell's palsy is thought to be caused by the waking up of a dormant virus, often at times of stress and lowered immunity, much in the same way as the chickenpox virus causes shingles long after the initial illness has passed.
The virus attacks one of the two facial nerves causing it to swell up and become constricted inside a bony passageway close to the ear. Signals then cease to be transmitted along it, paralysing one side of the face and rendering it expressionless.
Source: BBC News
No comments:
Post a Comment