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

Sometimes Lucy Bradford feels her non-epileptic seizures go through her body ‘like electric shocks’, other times they come out of the blue.

The 19-year-old can’t go to parties with her friends or do things that a normal teenager would do. She lives with constant pain and exhaustion, she sometimes has trouble walking, she can no longer drive or work and develops new ‘tics’ as time passes.

Bradford was diagnosed functional neurological disorder (FND) last August. Not much is known about FND except that it results from the malfunctioning of the central nervous system.

Sufferers may show signs of a stroke, brain tumor, or hemorrhage, but every scan and test comes back to normal. They may experience muscle weakness, paralysis, seizures, chronic pain, headaches, involuntary movements, and more.

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

Billing compared a person with FND to a computer with hardware and software. The brain’s hardware is intact, but there is one malfunction in the software 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 related to two major traumas she’d suffered in recent years.

At the age of 17, she was in a serious car accident while driving home from Nelson. Taking a corner too quickly in wet conditions caused her car to roll several times and she was flown to hospital with a broken spine.

Not long after, Bradford was sexually assaulted by a colleague.

She was diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety and depression.

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

“Because I was doing well, I think it took that time to get the FND going because I wasn’t in that flight or flight mode anymore. From then on it went downhill.”

In August, Bradford had leg twitches that wouldn’t stop. She went to the emergency department where she later developed non-seizures.

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

“It was so exhausting and so painful. My eyes close, my whole body shakes and it’s so painful, like electric shocks are going through my body. My whole body hurts.”

Mama Heather Spiers said it was heartbreaking to watch.

“She was in a lot of pain. I just cried because there was nothing I could do for her. It is scary.”

Bradford was a freshman nursing student when she was diagnosed. She can no longer study or work and because she lives with her partner she has no access to government funding.

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

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

“I see my friends, they have dream jobs, they go abroad, they live their best lives, 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 can be one major event or the accumulation of multiple events over a person’s lifetime,” he said.

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

Her family has one Give a small page to help pay for her treatment, including tests, which will go to the United States for analysis, rehabilitation costs, housing, daily food and living expenses, and psychologists’ fees.