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Chrissie is a 57-year-old woman living in Oxford, England. In 2012, after a slow onset, she found the left side of her face completely paralyzed. Doctors weren’t able to give her a reason for why it happened, but eventually, one surgeon performed the reanimation surgery that changed her life. This is her story, edited for length and clarity.
About 10 years ago, I noticed that my smile looked a bit lopsided, but I thought maybe I was just being vain. My partner at that time was a medic in the army, and he told me to go and get it checked out. So I went to my doctor and she phoned the neurology department, which said, “Oh, it’s probably nothing. It’s probably just slight Bell’s palsy. It will get better on its own.” But it didn’t—it got worse. I started struggling to blink on the left side of my face, because my eye wouldn’t fully close. Because I couldn’t blink, my eye wasn’t getting moisturized enough; other times, it would fill up with tears.
Doctors did various tests and MRI scans on me at the hospital in Oxford to see if there were any signs I had a tumor or I’d had a stroke, but they couldn’t find anything. Soon after, I started having trouble smiling properly—the left side of my face was beginning to drop. So I was referred to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham for facial physiotherapy. I did that with a therapist, but instead of getting better, I became almost completely paralyzed over time. She referred me to an ear, nose, and throat clinic, where I had all the same scans that Oxford did, but no one could see what had caused it either. The doctors said I could have been bitten by a tick, because I had been camping not long before it all started. I personally think it was stress, or related to the antibiotic spray I was using continuously over five or six years for what I thought were my chronic ear infections. (It turns out, I didn’t have the ear infection—I actually had eczema in my ear. The doctor in Birmingham prescribed me steroids, and I haven’t had an issue since).
It was constant antibiotics and stress, I think, because I’d been going through a horrendous time. I was divorced then, with two kids, and I had a house in Oxford that was worth more than half a million pounds. My partner at the time wanted to get on my mortgage so that he could secure another outlet for his car dealership. I allowed him to do that—but with a deed of trust on there to say that all the equity and the property belonged to me, should anything go wrong.
Turns out, without my knowing, he was taking funds out of my mortgage account—he took around £150,000 from me. When I realized, I threw him out. I had a bigger mortgage to pay after that, and I had a high-stress job at Mercedes-Benz, which I was struggling to keep on top of. My mental health really suffered. I had to sell my house, and now I don’t have any money to buy again. Then my auntie, who was like a mother to me, got cancer and passed away as I was dealing with my face becoming paralyzed. I’m quite a strong person, but it was like having a hammer keep coming down on you. As fast as you were trying to work the nail out, there was somebody coming down to hit it back in again.
My confidence became really low because of the way I looked. I’m a spontaneous smiler, and I smile quite quickly and easily. I still did, even though I was paralyzed, and it made me very self-conscious. Because of that, the facial muscles on my good side were so strong, they were twisting the bottom half of my face around to one side and I looked quite horrific.
In 2010, the Birmingham hospital referred me to Dr. Demetrius Evriviades [a plastic surgeon in West Midlands, England], who gave me my smile back and fixed my eye so I could blink again. He did a very difficult reanimation surgery and used a muscle from my thigh to hook onto the muscles at the corner of my mouth and then up to my ear, so when I would bite the back of my teeth, it would cause me to smile slightly. It was a 10-hour operation, and afterward, I was still paralyzed and had to do the physiotherapy and keep moving the muscles, through the biting action, to strengthen them.
The recovery process was slow. At first, I looked like the Elephant Man because my face was so swollen. I’d always thought I was quite pretty—I know that sounds vain—but to go out in public and have people stare at you was really hard. I couldn’t cope and soon had to stop working. I got so depressed at one point that I couldn’t feed or wash myself and I got anxiety attacks at just the thought of leaving the house.
Within six months, I could smile slightly by biting at the back of my mouth, but it took at least a year for the swelling to go down. When it finally did, my surgeon did a mini facelift. Today, not only can smile I evenly, but I’m strong enough to smile without clenching the back of my teeth. Other muscles in my face are still paralyzed, and that makes me look weird, but my face is symmetrical. Last year, I did fat grafting from my tummy to my cheek; I’d lost a lot of volume from where the muscles had stopped working. We may have to do more late, since some of it gets absorbed into your system.
Not knowing what caused this is the hardest thing—I didn’t get a diagnosis. I still worry sometimes it will happen again. Is there something that couldn’t be seen? And sometimes I feel angry as well. I feel angry with the doctor who didn’t diagnose eczema in my ear and allowed me to keep putting medicine into my ear. I don’t know if that had any effect on it, because I’m not a doctor and I’m not a pharmacist, but it can’t be right to be putting that many antibiotics into your system, continually, for five years or more. Overall though, I’m grateful to the National Health Service and to my surgeon for all that he did. I didn’t feel like my life was worth anything at one point, and he really gave me my life back. Obviously, I’m never going to look completely normal—but I feel confident enough today that I can go out and smile.
