Ella’s parents explain how a quick diagnosis and early treatment effectively treated a case of Lyme disease with facial palsy.
“We’d just come back from a lovely holiday in France. We arrived home on a Saturday, and that evening we noticed something odd about our daughter’s eye. It looked like she was squinting, and by the next day it had become really noticeable. She was holding her eye strangely and we were concerned something might be wrong with it.
We called 111 and ended up going to A&E. The doctor there thought it might be an allergic reaction and gave her Piriton. After that, the eye seemed to improve, so we felt a bit reassured.
But the next morning, we realised things weren’t quite right. In fact, we had been looking at her face the wrong way. It wasn’t that she was squinting – it was that one side of her face wasn’t moving at all. Her eye looked more open than usual because the muscles around it weren’t working.
We went straight to Winchester A&E, and a doctor there diagnosed her with Bell’s palsy, which is a type of facial paralysis. They mentioned that in some cases, this can be linked to Lyme disease, even though we hadn’t seen a tick bite or a rash, and honestly hadn’t even considered it. Just to be safe, they started her on antibiotics straight away while waiting for blood test results. She was also given a course of steroids to help with the nerve inflammation.
A few days later, we got the call: the test was positive for Lyme disease. At this point, she didn’t have any other symptoms – no fever, no rash, no joint pain – just the paralysis on one side of her face. We were referred for an eye appointment too, as her eyelid wasn’t closing properly, and we were worried about protecting her eye.
The good news is that after about three weeks, her face had completely recovered. She finished the course of antibiotics, and everything seems back to normal. She’s doing really well now, and we feel incredibly lucky that it was caught early.
Looking back, it’s a reminder that Lyme disease doesn’t always look like you expect. We never saw a tick, and there was no obvious bite – but it was there. We’re so grateful to the doctors who took it seriously from the start and acted quickly. Early treatment made all the difference.”
