This completely sucks and I'm so sorry that you have to go through it. I think you've been the recipient of my flailing-about enough that I'm almost certain I could dig up half a dozen instances of you saying this to me, so I'm pretty sure you know it, but I'll say it anyway: it's perfectly natural to be angry, upset, and not dealing well with the uncertainty. Take care of yourself emotionally as well as physically, okay?
(Also from experience: if you need to take a little while to lose your shit entirely, may I suggest not punching a wall. If you are the "must express complicated emotional storms physically" type like I am, I have learned through painful experience that pillows work a lot better. *rueful*)
I love you and if there's anything at all I can do, even if it's just listening, you've done it enough for me that I don't just owe you one, I kind of owe you a thousand, and I am happy to cash some of those in whenever.
The rest of this comment is a few suggestions for how to cope with things temporarily. You should stop reading here until you are in a good place to hear them.
* For what it's worth, I do most of my chewing on one side of my face and have since my late teens when my wisdom teeth erupted (badly) and I only had them removed on one side. I've since had the other side's wisdom teeth removed, like four years ago even, but over a decade of training myself to avoid chewing on that side has kind of stuck. The only thing it's done is given me a slight tendency towards jaw-aches on that side, and the tricks I learned back when I was singing and acting regularly to loosen up my jaw (this article has some of them even though I didn't learn them for TMJ; I don't know how well they'll adapt to your situation but it might!) make those aches go away.
* If you're using tape daily, on your face, you may want to try paper tape or self-adhering ace bandages and not surgical tape. (Which you may already be doing, but still!) Surgical tape can be very harsh on skin when it's repeatedly applied and removed in the same place, and everybody reacts differently to the various adhesives, but a lot of people will react to surgical tape applied and removed repeatedly over time, and you mentioned it hurting in the morning when you remove it. (Even if you do keep with the surgical tape, or switch to the paper tape: the 8 hours or whatever that you're asleep is not going to be enough to get the adhesive to loosen up enough for easy removal; I'd suggest laying a warm wet washcloth over it for 2-3 minutes before trying to peel.) You may also want to try the method of putting the gauze pad down on the eyelid first, then taping over that; it's usually enough to keep the eyelid shut.
* The information I'm finding suggests that warm wet heat and gentle self-massage applied to the affected areas 2-3 times daily during the early days of the condition can help -- if nothing else, it will help to keep the muscles at the edges of the affected areas from flipping out because of sudden new usage. Since I know you're probably worried: it takes a very long time for facial muscles to start to atrophy, because they're so powerful and so well-developed, especially if you're doing basic exercises as part of your therapy. I mean, we're talking years here. If recovery takes you a year, or even two -- and I really hope it doesn't take that long -- you're going to be a little bit sore once you start using those muscles again, but you're not going to have muscle atrophy.
* Even with partial facial paralysis, there are many, many ways to learn how to compensate, and there are lots of therapists who can teach you how to re-learn how to speak and move your facial muscles. I found a very good list of facial exercises and a diagram of the facial muscles, both of which you are already probably aware of but I show my love via research. (When my Nana first had this happen to her, it was in the early 80s and they didn't have a lot of the knowledge they have today, but her doctors had her doing a lot of those exercises just to maintain as much control as she could over the facial muscles. Hers wasn't Bell's, it was post-stroke nerve damage, but it had a lot of the same treatment.)
* For self-consciousness and the feeling that everyone's staring at you, which I struggle with an awful lot, remember: you know how your body is supposed to move. The people you run into daily, don't. (Obviously coworkers, family, etc, are more likely to be familiar with 'normal', but even then: people don't look too closely.) Yes, there will be a certain amount of "something about how this person's face is moving is wrong" that will ping people's radar, but honestly? The human brain will fill in a lot of detail itself, and is very good at actively normalizing the input it gets, and once people you know stop actively thinking "oh, right, peas had that face thing happen" they will literally stop noticing that part of your face doesn't move right. As for strangers? Fuck 'em. They don't matter.
Yes, a large part of facial expressions are carried in the little muscle movements, and yes, your facial expressions are going to look very uncanny-valley to you personally right now -- but even if, Universe forbid, you wind up being one of the few people who have Bell's permanently, you can learn a ton about small muscle movement, control, and compensation, and you will learn how to route around the blacked-out nerve signals as much as possible.
I can personally attest to the fact that learning to isolate particular muscle groups and change the way they move is fucking annoying and tedious and difficult, but it can be done. (By this point I can twitch individual muscles in my right hip/upper thigh and my left shoulder.) The Alexander technique was designed for posture and movement through the spinal column, but it teaches you a lot about listening to what your body is doing; if your therapists don't suggest adding an Alexander class to your physical therapy regime, I'd suggest trying it out a bit and seeing if you can adapt the techniques. (I learned Alexander for theatre, and have used a lot of it in the last five years or so.)
It will get better.
I will now put another bunch of blank space in this comment so you don't accidentally read it when reading comments below it, and follow up with a picture of a kitten.
no subject
This completely sucks and I'm so sorry that you have to go through it. I think you've been the recipient of my flailing-about enough that I'm almost certain I could dig up half a dozen instances of you saying this to me, so I'm pretty sure you know it, but I'll say it anyway: it's perfectly natural to be angry, upset, and not dealing well with the uncertainty. Take care of yourself emotionally as well as physically, okay?
(Also from experience: if you need to take a little while to lose your shit entirely, may I suggest not punching a wall. If you are the "must express complicated emotional storms physically" type like I am, I have learned through painful experience that pillows work a lot better. *rueful*)
I love you and if there's anything at all I can do, even if it's just listening, you've done it enough for me that I don't just owe you one, I kind of owe you a thousand, and I am happy to cash some of those in whenever.
The rest of this comment is a few suggestions for how to cope with things temporarily. You should stop reading here until you are in a good place to hear them.
* For what it's worth, I do most of my chewing on one side of my face and have since my late teens when my wisdom teeth erupted (badly) and I only had them removed on one side. I've since had the other side's wisdom teeth removed, like four years ago even, but over a decade of training myself to avoid chewing on that side has kind of stuck. The only thing it's done is given me a slight tendency towards jaw-aches on that side, and the tricks I learned back when I was singing and acting regularly to loosen up my jaw (this article has some of them even though I didn't learn them for TMJ; I don't know how well they'll adapt to your situation but it might!) make those aches go away.
* If you're using tape daily, on your face, you may want to try paper tape or self-adhering ace bandages and not surgical tape. (Which you may already be doing, but still!) Surgical tape can be very harsh on skin when it's repeatedly applied and removed in the same place, and everybody reacts differently to the various adhesives, but a lot of people will react to surgical tape applied and removed repeatedly over time, and you mentioned it hurting in the morning when you remove it. (Even if you do keep with the surgical tape, or switch to the paper tape: the 8 hours or whatever that you're asleep is not going to be enough to get the adhesive to loosen up enough for easy removal; I'd suggest laying a warm wet washcloth over it for 2-3 minutes before trying to peel.) You may also want to try the method of putting the gauze pad down on the eyelid first, then taping over that; it's usually enough to keep the eyelid shut.
* The information I'm finding suggests that warm wet heat and gentle self-massage applied to the affected areas 2-3 times daily during the early days of the condition can help -- if nothing else, it will help to keep the muscles at the edges of the affected areas from flipping out because of sudden new usage. Since I know you're probably worried: it takes a very long time for facial muscles to start to atrophy, because they're so powerful and so well-developed, especially if you're doing basic exercises as part of your therapy. I mean, we're talking years here. If recovery takes you a year, or even two -- and I really hope it doesn't take that long -- you're going to be a little bit sore once you start using those muscles again, but you're not going to have muscle atrophy.
* Even with partial facial paralysis, there are many, many ways to learn how to compensate, and there are lots of therapists who can teach you how to re-learn how to speak and move your facial muscles. I found a very good list of facial exercises and a diagram of the facial muscles, both of which you are already probably aware of but I show my love via research. (When my Nana first had this happen to her, it was in the early 80s and they didn't have a lot of the knowledge they have today, but her doctors had her doing a lot of those exercises just to maintain as much control as she could over the facial muscles. Hers wasn't Bell's, it was post-stroke nerve damage, but it had a lot of the same treatment.)
* For self-consciousness and the feeling that everyone's staring at you, which I struggle with an awful lot, remember: you know how your body is supposed to move. The people you run into daily, don't. (Obviously coworkers, family, etc, are more likely to be familiar with 'normal', but even then: people don't look too closely.) Yes, there will be a certain amount of "something about how this person's face is moving is wrong" that will ping people's radar, but honestly? The human brain will fill in a lot of detail itself, and is very good at actively normalizing the input it gets, and once people you know stop actively thinking "oh, right, peas had that face thing happen" they will literally stop noticing that part of your face doesn't move right. As for strangers? Fuck 'em. They don't matter.
Yes, a large part of facial expressions are carried in the little muscle movements, and yes, your facial expressions are going to look very uncanny-valley to you personally right now -- but even if, Universe forbid, you wind up being one of the few people who have Bell's permanently, you can learn a ton about small muscle movement, control, and compensation, and you will learn how to route around the blacked-out nerve signals as much as possible.
I can personally attest to the fact that learning to isolate particular muscle groups and change the way they move is fucking annoying and tedious and difficult, but it can be done. (By this point I can twitch individual muscles in my right hip/upper thigh and my left shoulder.) The Alexander technique was designed for posture and movement through the spinal column, but it teaches you a lot about listening to what your body is doing; if your therapists don't suggest adding an Alexander class to your physical therapy regime, I'd suggest trying it out a bit and seeing if you can adapt the techniques. (I learned Alexander for theatre, and have used a lot of it in the last five years or so.)
It will get better.
I will now put another bunch of blank space in this comment so you don't accidentally read it when reading comments below it, and follow up with a picture of a kitten.