What happened to Kirralee?
Welcome back!
I have been looking forward to sharing Kirralee's story with you, as her experience with functional symptoms is typical of what many will suffer. Her struggle to reach an understanding about the nature of her condition took years with many false starts. But eventually, through her incredible persistence and courage, she recovered.
Kirralee
When I first met Kirralee, she was scared out of her wits. For the last several nights, she had been waking with her heart feeling like it was leaping out of her chest. She had been to the hospital repeatedly, each time thinking she was going to die.
She would spend the wee hours in hospital, having test after test – apart from a racing heart, all were normal. Each morning, she would return home, exhausted but with her heart back to normal speed. This would repeat night after night.
Kirralee was having panic attacks, but she was so frightened by the unexpected and overwhelming experience that she could not accept this.
Convinced that she must have heart disease to cause such powerful symptoms, she went to cardiologist after cardiologist, only to be told the same thing: her heart was normal. Of course, waking with a heart rate over 160 beats per minute is not normal functioning, but this was not explained in a helpful way.
Many people with functional conditions struggle to accept that such strong symptoms could possibly happen if their body has nothing wrong with it.
To be clear early on, functional symptoms can and often are more severe than symptoms due to physical disease:
Functional pain is often more severe and longlasting
Functional seizures are often more prolonged and do not respond to medication
Functional forms of fatigue can take so long to diagnose that recovery is very difficult
FUNCTIONAL SYMPTOMS ARE DISABLING EVEN IF THE TESTS SHOW YOUR BODY IS FINE
And yet, with the right management, I have seen many people make a good recovery.
It’s for this reason that I wrote my book, ‘What the Hell is Wrong with me?’
I would have liked to have spared Kirralee the months of fear and suffering. If I had been able to persuade her that functional symptoms can be very powerful, I may have prevented her wasting thousands of dollars on futile investigation and treatments.
How did Kirralee recover?
The essence of what I was able to do to help Kirralee was to encourage her to stop looking for someone to fix her heart and, instead, provide her with the means to
Understand what factors cause functional symptoms like hers
Recognise these factors in herself
Build a team to help her learn how to modify these factors
Develop the skills and practices to restore her normal functioning (in her, this meant a restoration of normal heart rate)
You can read about Kirralee's journey to recovery in my book. But you might like to know that she is now enjoying full health, with no further heart palpitations or emergency dashes to hospital.
Sadly, despite success stories like Kirralee’s, I can describe people with classic functional symptoms, who have refused to accept this, going off in pursuit of a medical diagnosis, even having repeated tests despite the first tests being normal.
This is understandable given the fact that the very existence of functional conditions is so poorly understood by doctors and patients alike.
It is my sincerest wish that everyone comes to accept that
Functional symptoms are real, and often more disabling than equivalent medical conditions
Functional symptoms are common: did you know that one in three patients seeing their doctor have symptoms not explained by any medical condition, ie , are functional?
It is time that everyone, doctors and patients alike, came to understand how these symptoms arise and what to do to treat them
In the next newsletter, I will explain the first of the core principles necessary to understand why your symptoms occurred.
You might prefer to be notified about my book, being released in June