It was a terrifying moment for Mary King. On June 1, sitting on the runway in Charlotte, N.C., on a plane bound for Baltimore where she planned to celebrate her upcoming wedding with friends, the 25-year-old television reporter realized she couldn't rub her lips together. Then, she couldn't move the right side of her face or blink her right eye.
She paged the flight attendant for help, and a doctor on board the plane said King had better get to a hospital. The pilot took the plane back to the airport, and King's father rushed her to the nearest emergency room.
King feared she was having a stroke, but the doctor had an even more unexpected diagnosis: she had Bell's palsy.
When King finally looked at her face in the mirror at the hospital, she said she felt a wave of despair: The right side of it was frozen, her eye was unblinking and the side of her mouth drooped, even when she tried to smile.
"All of a sudden it hits you how different you look," she said. "I kept thinking, What if I still look like this on my wedding day?"
People with Bell's palsy aren't typically stricken for life, but recovery can take weeks to months. The condition, a temporary facial paralysis, strikes when the seventh cranial nerve, the tiny nerve controlling the face, gets inflamed or damaged, perhaps from some kind of trauma or viruses such as Epstein Barr or the varicella zoster virus, the virus that causes chicken pox and shingles.
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