Teen with neurological disorder wants to take back control of her life

Sometimes Lucy Bradford will feel her non-epileptic seizures coming on “like electric shocks” coursing through her body, other times they come out of nowhere.

The 19-year-old can’t go to parties with her friends or do things a normal teenager would do. She lives in constant pain and exhaustion, at times she struggles to walk, she can no longer drive or work and is picking up new “tics” as time goes on.

Bradford was diagnosed with functional neurological disorder (FND) last August. Not much is understood about FND except that it is the result of the central nervous system not functioning properly.

Sufferers might show signs of having a stroke, brain tumour or bleeding, yet every scan and test comes back normal. They might experience muscle weakness, paralysis, seizures, chronic pain, headaches, involuntary movements, and more.

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Feeling desperate to take some control back after her diagnosis, Bradford researched online and found Stefan Billing, a Wānaka-based chiropractor who specialises in functional neurology.

Billing compared a person with FND to a computer with hardware and software. The hardware of the brain is intact, but there is a glitch in the software that is causing the symptoms.

The exact cause of FND is unknown.

Bradford said it was hard to pinpoint when her symptoms started and why, but she believed it was connected to two significant traumas she suffered in the past few years.

At 17, she was in a serious car crash while driving home from Nelson. Taking a corner too fast in wet conditions, her car rolled multiple times, and she was flown to hospital with a fractured spine.

Not long after, Bradford was sexually assaulted by a co-worker.

She was diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety and depression.

Bradford felt she had worked through her trauma and was in a good place. But then the FND symptoms started.

“I think because I was doing well, it took that time to set off the FND because I wasn’t in that flight or flight mode any more. It all went downhill from there.”

In August Bradford had leg twitches that would not stop. She went to the emergency department where she later started having non-epileptic seizures.

She had been on antidepressants and was told it was serotonin poisoning. Two weeks later, still experiencing seizures, she went back to the hospital for MRI scans, which came back normal. She was later diagnosed with FND.

“It was so tiring and so painful. My eyes shut, my whole body is shaking and it’s so painful, like electric shocks going through my body. My whole body aches.”

Mum Heather Spiers said it was heartbreaking to watch.

“She was in a lot of pain. I just cried because I couldn’t do a thing for her. It’s scary.”

Bradford was a first year nursing student when she was diagnosed. She can no longer study or work and because she lives with her partner, she cannot access government funding.

When her friends are out, she is home in bed, either because she is too exhausted to join them or worried she will have a seizure and scare people.

“I don’t want to traumatise other people.”

“I see my friends, they’re in dream jobs, going overseas, living their best life, and I’m just stuck,” she said.

FND is an umbrella diagnosis for people with neurological symptoms. There was no clearly designed cause and effect relationship, Billing said.

“People often have a unique set of symptoms. [It is] difficult to diagnose and develop a treatment strategy.”

“Triggers of FND could be one significant event or the accumulation of multiple events over someone’s lifetime,” he said.

Bradford will soon start treatment with Billing, focusing first on her gut health.

Her family has set up a Givealittle page to help pay for her treatment including tests, which will go to the United States for analysis, rehabilitation costs, accommodation, everyday food and living costs and psychologist’s fees.