A woman believes she developed severe vertigo after using her phone too much, leaving her bed bound and needing a wheelchair.
Fenella Fox would often be scrolling online on her iPhone and iPad for up to 14 hours a day while running her OnlyFans account and claims it eventually left her unable to walk.
The 29-year-old, from Worcester, initially started getting head and neck aches and found herself going to bed early to cope with the pain.
She moved to Portugal and her symptoms steadily got worse, peaking in November 2021.
"I started to get dizzy. I remember walking back after getting my groceries one time and I just thought it was sunstroke or something, I just didn’t feel okay," she told the Mirror.
"I had to sit down on the side of the road on this tiny patch of shade thinking I’ve got to push through this."
A week later it suddenly returned.
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"It just felt like I really couldn’t walk properly, I felt really unwell. Dizzy, and kind of distorted. I can visualise it but it’s not easy to explain," she said.
One day her friend came to visit and suddenly Fenella said she felt so bad she needed to go home.
But getting into bed she just lay scrolling on her phone.
"I’m in bed, I’m scrolling from wake until sleep. What I don’t know is at that point I’m making myself worse," she said.
"I didn’t know it was my phone causing it, I thought I’d picked up a bug - was it Covid?"
Her condition got so bad she couldn't look after herself and had to move back to the UK to live with her parents.
Fenella said: "It got me so sick I wasn’t able to stand up, I wasn’t able to shower.
"I couldn’t cook for myself. I ended up needing a wheelchair to get home and my parents had to look after me. I was sick then for about six months."
She had visited a doctor in Portugal who did tests including closing her eyes and walking in a straight line but she couldn't do it.
He asked her to close her eyes and lift her knees up but she ended up "rotating and looking the other way - that's not normal".
"I had a serious problem with my balance."
Describing her journey back to the UK, Fenella said: "I got a taxi to the airport fine, but when I was in the airport that’s when I was met with a wheelchair and I had a wheelchair from that point up until meeting my mum the other end, and the wheelchair up until the door of her car. Then car to bed, then in bed for ages."
Fenella visited around half a dozen doctors in total, including once back in the UK, "and all of them didn't know what it was".
It was only when her dad found an article about cyber motion sickness or digital vertigo that she recognised the symptoms mirrored how she felt.
The condition is becoming more common and leaves sufferers feeling dizzy usually due to a malfunction of the nervous system that is responsible for blood and oxygen flow to the brain and body.
Fenella said after reading up on the condition she became convinced that was causing her problems.
"I turned off my phone and threw it into the back of the cupboard or gave it to my parents and was like 'please do not let me on this'.
"Then I was able to walk again." she said.
Fenella estimates if she uses her phone for several hours a day it can bring her symptoms back on and they take three or four days to go away again.
She said: "With vertigo they do advise that you get up and go for a walk.
"Now I know the answer is get up and go for a walk, turn off your phone, throw it away and try and readjust your mind."
However, Fenella relies on her OnlyFans account to bring in her income, which she estimates is around £15,000 a month.
To keep up with the competition, she needs to be regularly posting content on all social media channels, as well as networking through the likes of Telegram, which has now become nearly impossible.
She said: "It is unreal. That is our life, our world. If we want to make money, we’ve got to be on [our phone] wake until sleep. There’s so many hours to put in.
"I can’t do it anymore, I can’t do it myself. I try sometimes to put in the hours that I used to but I get sick all over again."
