A 29-year-old woman was left bedbound and required a wheelchair to get around after using her mobile phone for 14 hours a day. Fenella Fox says that being on her phone and tablet for long periods of time each day left her with severe vertigo.
Fenella, who used the devices to run her OnlyFans account, started suffering from head and neck aches and found herself going to sleep earlier to cope with the pain. Her symptoms peaked in November 2021 and after visiting multiple doctors, she was still struggling to get a diagnosis, the Coventry Telegraph reports.
It was not until her father discovered an article about cyber motion sickness or digital vertigo that Fenella recognised her symptoms. The technology induced condition leaves sufferers feeling dizzy usually due to a malfunction of the nervous system that is responsible for blood and oxygen flow.
Speaking of when she first started to feel ill, the 29-year-old recalled: "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.
"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." After the first attack, Fenella suffered the same feeling again a week later.
She said: "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 explained that in the days that followed, she felt so bad that she went to bed but spent her time scrolling on her phone.
She explained: "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.
"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 that she had to move back in 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 visited a doctor who conducted a series of tests as Fenella said: "I had a serious problem with my balance." The OnlyFans creator was in Portugal when she felt seriously ill and had to fly back to the UK.
She 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."
UK doctors were left puzzled by her mysterious illness but Fenella later discovered the cause of her symptoms through an article about cyber motion sickness caused by looking at her technology devices too much. She said: "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."
The 29-year-old claims if she uses her phone for several hours it can bring back her dreadful symptoms which take three or four days to clear up 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, not using her phone is a huge problem for Fenella who relies on her OnlyFans account for her income which she estimates is around £15,000 a month.
Therefore, she needs to be regularly posting content on all of her social media channels. 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."
Don't miss the latest news from around Scotland and beyond - Sign up to our daily newsletter here.
