# Recovering from Bell's Palsy

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recovering-from-bells-palsy/758819>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [June 30, 2016, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recovering-from-bells-palsy/758819 "2016-06-30T19:11:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Roderick\_Femm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/roderick_femm/32/14875_2.png) [@Roderick\_Femm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roderick_Femm)\
**Post date:** [June 30, 2016, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recovering-from-bells-palsy/758819/1 "2016-06-30T19:11:03Z")

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It’s been two weeks since this started. It came on overnight, along with a very bad cold. The cold was so bad I didn’t want to go out, so I didn’t go to the doctor for Prednisone (anti-inflammatory, I presume) which might have started recovery sooner.

I had this one time before, around 20 years ago. Woke up to a half-dead face. I panicked and thought I had had a stroke, so I raced to the doctor and then to a neurologist. This time it was just “Oh, crap, this again.”

I don’t mind so much the way I look but the skin below one eye has been sagging and the eyelid not blinking properly, so I’ve been wearing an eye patch a lot of the time, to keep the eye closed. Otherwise it gets irritated and sensitive to light. There are also problems with my mouth, but the only real problem there is that I can’t spit out my toothpaste, I have to let gravity take care of it.

So this morning my eye seems marginally better, also my upper lip. Apparently I am on the road to recovery, finally. Here’s hoping that progress will be steady.

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**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\
**Post date:** [June 30, 2016, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recovering-from-bells-palsy/758819/2 "2016-06-30T21:41:23Z")

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Ewww… Bell’s is no fun. My husband had a couple bouts of it. The standard treatment (which you should have called your doc for as soon as you noticed it) is prednisone and valacyclovir.

Catch it early, and you might be over and done in a couple of days, or at least about 95% back to normal. As you’re discovering, left alone, it takes a handful of weeks.