HAVANA TIMES – That early morning was terrible. Daniel was only ten months old and was sick with otitis. The sticky fever, the crying, the sleepless nights, the compresses, and the worries were piling up.
Perhaps that’s why, when I started to feel my face strange and my face numb, I thought it was due to fatigue. I didn’t pay attention to it at that moment. I just wanted Daniel to get better and for the morning to come, because with the sunlight, problems sometimes seem less serious.
I never imagined that, with the sunlight, a dark moment in my life would begin. I got up to splash water on my face and saw my mouth strange. I tried to move it and put it back in place, but I couldn’t. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. The smile was a horrible grimace that appeared in the mirror as if it were a tasteless joke.
From shock, I went to fear, then to anger, to denial, and to sadness. It was hard for me to reach the supposed acceptance, but I don’t think I ever did. Why was this happening to me? What happened to me for my body to respond like this? Did I do something wrong? Many questions and few answers.
The most shocking thing for me was when I tried to drink coffee and it spilled out of the side of my mouth. It seemed like a nightmare. I missed my face, I missed laughing, I missed being me.
Then came the doctor’s visits, an emergency CT scan, acupuncture, treatments, high doses of prednisone, appointments with the neurologist, massages, exercises. During all this, I had to take care of Daniel and try to feel better so that my pain wouldn’t affect him. It was very difficult.
Luckily, at that time the child was small and although he looked at me strangely, he was not aware of what was happening. I didn’t want to see anyone. I isolated myself, I distanced myself, I didn’t look in the mirror, I hardly spoke — me, who has always been talkative—. The whole world changed for me. I had to take a necessary pause to think and recognize the damage that had led me to the path of paralysis.
Behind the “I’m fine”
Since I was diagnosed with facial paralysis, I started studying the subject to understand the causes, the consequences, and to avoid it from happening again in the future. It was a moment of deep introspection, a turning point where I decided to look inward and confront the accumulated stress that had been playing tricks on me for so long. For the first time, I stopped to think about myself, about how I was treating myself, and about the urgent need to take care of myself.
For years, even since my childhood, I had lived in a constant race agains
