Hannah Berner has discovered a way to smile through the pain—at least internally.
After the comedian reported a negative reaction to botox injections—which she receives to manage temporomandibular joint disorder (commonly known as TMJ)—she has found a positive aspect of the incident that made “smiling feel like weightlifting.”
“I’m so happy that it was making people laugh because I was disturbed,” Berner told the New York Times in an interview published on August 16. “I was upset. I had jobs on the line.”
This was the Summer House alum’s third time receiving botox in the masseter muscles (which connect the cheeks to the jaw), as she explained on her Giggly Squad podcast in June, because “I clench my teeth really bad and I wake up with headaches sometimes,” which is a common cause for the pain, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Although the medical incident that Berner has termed the “masseter massacre” was far from ideal, the 35-year-old has managed to find a silver lining in not being able to smile as fully as she normally does.
