Bristol Palin is giving fans an update on her ongoing health struggle.
During an Instagram Q&A, Palin was inquired about how she is managing her struggle with facial paralysis and what specific symptoms she experienced before noticing the weakness in her facial muscles.
“I woke up and it was paralyzed completely out of the blue – no warning, wasn’t sick didn’t get the v@x, no recent Botox … just paralyzed,” she explained in response to a question regarding what symptoms she experienced.
This response was shared alongside a video of herself displaying the contrast between the left and right sides of her face, with a timestamp of January 20, 2025, included.
The former reality TV star was later asked how she is handling the diagnosis emotionally, to which she replied she thinks she is “handling it well,” but admitted “I can’t look at pictures of myself rn.” Palin also shared her paralysis is “probably 70% back to normal.”
Other fans shared concern that the paralysis could be permanent, to which Palin replied there is a possibility, “but I don’t think it will be.”
“It is slowly improving,” she wrote in her response. “My doctor thinks it will be another 3 months before I’m *hopefully* back to normal.”
Palin first announced she was experiencing sudden facial paralysis on her Instagram stories in January.
In the story, she recalled waking up one morning “with a little weird sensation in my face,” and after only a few hours, “the entire left side of my face was numb and just paralyzed.”
After seeing a doctor and undergoing multiple tests, “nothing came back in all the results” and she was prescribed “steroids” and “other medications” at the time.
One of the possible causes could be “a case of Bell’s palsy,” which doctors noted could have been brought on by stress or lack of sleep.
Bell’s palsy is a condition that causes “sudden weakness in the muscles on one side of the face,” according to the Mayo Clinic.
The weakness is typically short-term, and the exact cause is unknown.
A few months after sharing her struggles with facial paralysis, Palin took to social media in April 2025 to share that she was one year sober.
“365 days without alcohol.. *which sounds dramatic because I’ve never been a big ‘drinker,’” she wrote on her Instagram story, per the Daily Mail. “But this year of having a completely sober mind has allowed me to reevaluate a lot,” she continued. “I don’t want to alter the state of my mind, and don’t want to ‘take the edge off’ of anything. 10/10 would recommend.”
