Young Scots nurse lost ability to walk after 'lightning' pain up legs on shift

dailyrecord.co.uk:

A Scots nurse has been left unable to walk more than 10 steps without a zimmer frame after being diagnosed with three rare diseases within three months.

Katie Ash-Wilson, of Kilmarnock, had been working as a staff nurse at Ayr Hospital during the height of the covid pandemic when she felt a shooting pain like 'lightning' up the back of her legs on a night shift in November 2020.Then aged 24, she put the pain down to being on her feet all the time.The following day she woke up and realised she was losing the feeling in her feet.Katie attended A&E at Crosshouse Hospital and was immediately blue-lighted to the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow where she ended up staying for five weeks.The NHS worker lost the ability to walk soon after being brought in.She was diagnosed with Hypermobility Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (hEDS), which attacks the nervous system and Functional Neurological Disease (FND), which affects the strength of ligaments in the body.Katie told the Record: "In the run up to being admitted to hospital, I had increasing back pain but I didn't think anything of it."It wasn't until I was on my last of three nightshifts that I started experiencing lightning-like shooting pain going down my legs.

I did the typical nurse thing of just driving home and thinking it'd be fine."When I woke up the next afternoon, I had a sense that something wasn't quite right.

I was admitted to hospital later that night.One month after being admitted to hospital, Katie was transferred by wheelchair to the Douglas Grant Rehabilitation Centre in Irvine, where she spent a further eight weeks receiving 30 minutes of intense physiotherapy a day.She was then diagnosed with Fowler’s syndrome which causes muscles in the bladder to