A woman who thought she had conjunctivitis was actually having a stroke.
Nicole Lamoureux, 51, a TikTok business influencer, thought she was having an allergic reaction when her eyelid became swollen and pink last week.
As she was driving to the hospital with her husband, her arms began to shake and she began to speak much more slowly.
Doctors told him he had suffered a “functional stroke,” caused by abnormal functioning of the nervous system rather than damage to the brain.
Business strategy influencer Nicole Lamoureux, 51, thought she was having an allergic reaction when her eyelid swelled and turned pink.
Doctors told him he had suffered a functional stroke, sometimes also called a “mimic stroke,” which occurs when there is a problem with the way the brain sends and receives information to the rest of the body.
“My brain can’t connect very well to my other limbs,” he said in a TikTok video viewed by more than 1.3 million people.
FND can start without warning and affects the way the brain and body send and receive signals to each other.
Unlike a stroke, which appears in specific areas on brain scans, FND affects messaging mechanisms in the brain that are not visible in this way, leading to medical professionals overlooking FND too often. , say the experts.
The symptoms of functional neurological disorder (FND) are real and are caused by a problem with the brain’s messaging capabilities.
For example, people may not be able to send a message to their legs to move, even though there may not be any damage to the legs or brain on a scan.
This is why FND patients are often dismissed and told that their symptoms are “all in their head.”
FND can include a wide variety of neurological symptoms, such as limb weakness or seizures.
Nicole took to TikTok to warn her 44,000 followers not to dismiss unexplained symptoms and get them checked out by a doctor.
Conjunctivitis, inflammation or infection of the outer membrane of the eyeball and inner eyelid, is usually caused by a viral infection. It can also be caused by a bacterial infection or an allergic reaction.
The initial stroke-like symptoms, such as swelling of the face and difficulty seeing with one eye in Nicole’s case, are likely due to physiological arousal, according to the Journal of neuropsychiatry.
This could be due, for example, to stress and could cause a migraine.
A business strategy influencer, Nicole Lamoureux is also president and CEO of the National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics.
Panic and anxiety “trigger increased automatic arousal, adding to the initial symptoms,” the Journal stated.
Niccole now has limited mobility in her right leg and “sometimes my right arm doesn’t work either,” she said.
Limb weakness can occur due to an “abnormal prediction of weakness…at various levels of the motor control pathway.”
In other words, patients expect their leg and arm not to move, so they don’t.
In a TikTok video, Nicole can be seen dragging her right leg while using a walker to try to walk.
Symptoms of FND can include loss of motor control, sensory symptoms, speech problems, seizures, visual symptoms, cognitive problems, and bladder and bowel problems.
FND affects approximately 12 in every 100,000 people.
The exact cause of FND is unknown. Sometimes FND occurs after a stressful event or in people with a history of emotional or physical trauma.
When stress pathways are activated, there is an increase in levels of cortisol and an enzyme called α-amylase, which affects the body. Research suggests that chronic activation of stress pathways can lead to symptoms.
“Physiological responses to stress can become a conditioned response and, over time, the threshold of the physiological response falls until symptoms appear in response to minor stressors or even the memory of an event,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry.
Nicole said she had a “massive migraine” right before the stroke, along with what she thought was conjunctivitis and swelling in her face.
“I’ve been under enormous stress for the last few years,” he said.
‘Please put your safety and personal care first. “Please remember to take care of yourself and not put the needs of others before your own,” Nicole added.
Treatment for FND includes physical therapy and speech therapy to improve patients’ symptoms.
“If you wake up and think you have pink eye… and they give you medicine for pink eye, but it’s not pink eye, you go to the hospital,” he said.