Bristol Palin is starting to feel better amid her ongoing facial paralysis.
During a Thursday, July 17, Instagram Story Q&A, Palin, 34, was asked how she was handling her health battle.
“I feel like I’m handling it well,” she wrote. “I can’t look at pictures of myself [right now].”
Palin further noted that her face is “probably 70 percent back to normal.”
Bristol Palin Jokes About Trying to Look ‘Normal’ After Facial Paralysis
Sarah Palin’s eldest daughter revealed in January that she had been dealing with an unexplained case of facial paralysis for nearly two weeks.
“I woke up nine days ago with a weird little sensation in my face,” Bristol explained on January 29. “My mouth was pulling this way, and it just felt a little off. So, I went and looked in the mirror. I’m like, ‘Wow, this is looking a little weird.’”
According to Bristol, she could barely blink her eyes and had “no movement” on one side of her face.
“[I] went to the doctor. They ran tests, they did a CT scan [and] they put me on steroids, put me on other medications,” she explained at the time. “Nothing came back with all the results. They think it’s just a case of Bell’s palsy, maybe brought on by stress or lack of sleep. I’m not really sure. There’s nothing that I was super stressed out about, but I think it was brought on by stress.”
Bell’s palsy is defined by the Mayo Clinic as a temporary condition that causes sudden muscle weakness on one side of the face.
In another Instagram Q&A slide shared on Thursday, Bristol detailed her symptoms.
Bristol Palin Details ‘Painful’ Facial Paralysis and Slow Recovery
“I woke up and it was paralyzed, completely out of the blue,” she recalled. “No warning. [I] wasn’t sick, didn’t get the v@x, no recent Botox. Just paralyzed.”
Bristol has not publicly disclosed what caused her facial paralysis, but stressed on Thursday that she doesn’t think it is a “permanent” condition.
“It *could* be permanent, but I don’t think it will be,” she said in a follow-up slide on her Stories. “It is slowly improving. My doctor thinks it will be another three months before I’m *hopefully* back to normal.”
Bristol has also tried to treat her symptoms.
“I’ve been doing all the things,” she said in a social media update in February. “I’ve been doing acupuncture, lymphatic massage, oxygen chamber treatment, red light therapy, cutting out almost all of the processed foods, eliminating most caffeine — I’ll still have a cup of coffee in the morning. [I’m] trying to clean up everything.”
