Young Girl Endures Bout of Lyme Disease, Bell's Palsy

By Linda McCarty
The Winchester Star
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STEPHENS CITY -- While Jessica Lemieux's close friends were supportive and sympathetic, others in her peer-group laughed and made fun of her when she couldn't smile or close her left eye.

Jessica Lemieux suffered the symptoms of Bell's Palsy, triggered by Lyme Disease, which included paralysis of the facial nerve that distorts one side of the face. Her facial nerves are now recovering.
(Photo by Scott Mason)
The 10-year-old Orchard View Elementary School fifth-grader is recovering from Bell's palsy, a paralysis of the facial nerve that distorts one side of the face.

Jessica's mother, Linda Teets, said the palsy, which affected the left side of Jessica's face, was triggered by a recent bout of Lyme disease, which comes from the bite of an infected deer tick.

``It was very different and very embarrassing at school when I tried to smile,'' said Jessica, who is getting her smile back and is having more success at blinking her eye. ''When people made fun of me, I just ignored them,''

Teets, a fourth-grade teacher at Armel Elementary School, said Jessica began running a fever of about 102 degrees in November.

``She was complaining of a sore neck, and the area behind her left ear was very red, sore,'' said Teets, a Stephens City area resident. ``Jessica said her ear felt like she had a sunburn and said her joints were aching.''

Teets took her daughter to see her pediatrician, who diagnosed Jessica with a viral infection.

Late one Saturday night, Jessica's temperature jumped up to 104.5 degrees, and Teets took her to Urgent Care the following morning.

``The doctor at Urgent Care ordered a lot of tests and concluded that from the redness behind her ear, she had cellulitis (a subcultaneous inflammation of connective tissue) and prescribed an antibiotic,'' Teets said.

Teets suspected that it may have been Lyme disease after finding out what the symptoms were on the Internet, but the doctor didn't test for it.

``That night there was a ring around Jessica's ear,'' Teets said, ``and I took a picture of it.''

Jessica also told her mother that she picked something she thought may have been small scab from behind her ear.

``I think it was a deer tick,'' Teets said.

The Urgent Care doctor tested Jessica for Lyme disease at Teets request, when she returned with her daughter for a followup visit.

But the test was negative.

Jessica began feeling better and the redness and ring went away, until about three days after taking her last pill, when the infection returned and the redness behind her ear had spread.

The doctors at Urgent Care continued giving Jessica antibiotics.

Then one day Jessica's after-school sitter noticed that her face was partially paralyzed.

``When she tried to smile, the left side of her face wouldn't move and her left eye wouldn't close,'' Teets said. ``I was scared to death.''

``I was scared too,'' Jessica said. ``I didn't know what was happening to me. I didn't know if my face was going to stay that way or maybe even get worse.''

Teets took Jessica to the Winchester Medical Center's emergency department, where a doctor diagnosed her daughter with Lyme disease and Bell's palsy, even though those tests showed up negative too.

``He told me that the tests were sometimes false-negative, and he thought it was Lyme disease that caused the Bell's palsy,'' Teets said.

The doctor, who had never treated a young child with Bell's palsy, consulted doctors at the University of Virginia Medical Center, where a similar case had been treated, to figure out what to prescribe for Jessica.

The doctor told Teets that about 95 percent of patents completely recover from Bell's palsy.

``But I've been worried about the 5 percent who don't,'' Teets said.

Teets, though, is seeing almost daily improvements with her daughter's facial muscles and believes she will make a full recovery.

``But now I'm afraid she'll get a virus and it will come back,'' Teets said.

Jessica said the worst part of her ordeal was when she became very sad because she couldn't laugh.''