Hastings woman accused of faking rare condition urges for more awareness
Lucy McNulty has Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, which causes severe pain without any physical symptoms
A Hastings woman accused of faking a rare condition which leaves her in constant agony is urging for more awareness after having to educate doctors about her pain.
Lucy McNulty says she spent two years being accused of making up her Complex Regional Pain Syndrome after medics failed to find a physical symptom causing her distress.
The rare neurological condition causes extreme physical pain without a physical symptom to accompany it.
"Basically what happens is your nerves misfire," the 26-year-old explained.
"So my brain is sending signals to my body like something's hurting, but there's not actually like a broken bone or something there. It's just this broken relay of just constant pain signals.
"There's lots of things you get like electric shock pains and burning sensations."
She told Greatest Hits Radio that the pain began after she fractured her ankle as a teenager - beginning in her foot and gradually spreading across her whole body.
It meant she became reliant on a wheelchair and eventually crutches to help manage her symptoms.
" I must have been around 13 and my mum was sitting next to me and the doctor in the fracture clinic was moving my foot all around and I was screaming.
"He said, 'Oh no, it's not hurting you', because he was looking at the X-ray and because there was nothing on the X-ray in his eyes, I was fine."
Recently, Lucy raised hundreds of pounds completing the Hastings Half Marathon for Burning Nights, a charity which supports people with CRPS.
She's now calling for more compassion surrounding conditions like hers - both within, and outside, the medical field.
"A lot of people look at me and think that I'm perfectly OK, but really I'm in like a heck of amount of pain.
"Sometimes they just need that better understanding that just because someone looks like they're perfectly healthy and OK doesn't mean they are."