Laughing, crying, being surprised, being scared, talking- these are all the things that make us human. We use our face to express them which includes a lot of our facial muscles. Therefore, feeling numbness in our face that debilitates our ability to move at least a part of our face feels terrifying. The numbness can affect respective parts of your face or the entire area.
Be it on the left side of your face or on the right, the causes of numbness are numerous.
Stroke
After heart diseases, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases and accidents, stroke is one of the most often death causes, killing one person every four minutes. Numbness in the left side of the face is one of the 1st symptoms a doctor will be looking for if he/she is suspecting you’re having a stroke. It happens due to the reduced blood supply to the brain which eventually leads to lack of oxygen and death of brain cells. Besides the numbness, you should also watch out for confusion and difficulty in understanding, headaches accompanied with vomiting and altered consciousness, eyesight problems and troubled walking and coordination.
Bells Palsy
This condition can hit anyone between the ages of 16 and 60. The first one to describe the disease was Charles Bell. When a nerve in one of your facial muscles becomes inflamed, swollen or compressed, it produces paralysis of one side of the face. Fortunately, the paralysis is temporary and you may experience difficulty smiling and closing your eyes until it goes away.
Rhinosinusitis
Even such a trivial thing as stuffed nose can make you feel like half of your face is non-existent. This condition is also referred to as acute sinusitis. When the membranes lining your sinuses are infected or inflamed, mucus won’t drain out from your nose and will cause the feeling of pressure in the cheek bones. Rhinosinusitis is not only caused by cold but also by bacteria, fungi, allergies, lack of cilia (hairs pushing the mucus out of your nose), nasal polyps, tumors etc. If the condition persists, then you’re probably experiencing chronic or acute sinusitis
Mumps
When young, many of you were probably told not to try too hard to blow balloons or that blowing too many of them will get you mumps. Although you can’t really get the disease that way, the logic behind it is not all that unjustified. Mumps attack your saliva glands, making them enlarged and at times painful. It is highly viral and you may contract it through someone’s saliva, nasal secretions or even close personal contact. So, what your parents were probably afraid of is that someone else was touching the balloons. Numbness in the face is only one of the symptoms for mumps accompanied with high fever, fatigue, weight loss, loss of appetite and headache. In rare cases, mumps can cause complications in the form of brain or reproductive organ inflammation. However, the disease is usually treated within one week by taking a rest, drinking a lot of fluids, taking painkillers and putting ice on the inflamed glands.
Lyme disease
This one is spread by the black-legged or deer ticks. The symptoms usually overlap with the ones of the flu and can start anywhere between 3-30 days from the infection. The tick needs to be attached to you for at least 24 hours in order to transmit the disease. In the beginning, you may experience fatigue, fever, chills, and headache. Additionally, your lymph nodes may be swollen, sometimes to the extent of leading to the numbness of one side of your face.
Anorexia Nervosa
The disease is usually associated with the adolescents but unfortunately, many younger children have been affected by it as well as older people. It is defined as an eating disorder where a person restricts a number of calories they eat usually due to the distorted picture of their weight. The symptoms may also include vomiting which the patients forcefully do in order to get out the food from them. Even larger-sized people can be diagnosed with anorexia but this is extremely rare due to the prejudice against fat people.
Burns
Be them chemical or thermal, burns could cause swellings and blisters which can be painful to the point of causing numbness in the left side of the face. Some additional symptoms include blisters, skin changes and shortness of breath.
Leave a Reply