A woman from Worcester dedicated to running her OnlyFans account has ended up as a wheelchair user because she has been addicted to using her phone.

Fenella Fox, 29, admits to scrolling on her iPhone and iPad around 14 hours a day, which she believes has made her unable to walk.

She thought noticed pain in her head and neck, the aches were so bad she would start going to bed early to relieve the symptoms.

Fox moved to Portugal in November 2021, but it was around the same time when her pain started to become unbearable.

"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.

"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,"

Fox recalled a day when one of her friends came over to visit, she was in such excruciating pain she had to go straight to bed where she spent hours 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?"

Fox had no choice but to return home and go and live with her parents back in Worcester.

"It got me so sick I wasn’t able to stand up, I wasn’t able to shower,” she said.

"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."

Before taking a flight back to England she was examined by a doctor in Portugal who checked her eyesight and asked her to walk in a straight line, but she was unable to.

The doctor also asked if she could close her eyes and lift up her knees, but, again, Fox was unable to do so.

After the check over Fox boarded a plane back to the UK, but as she explained, it was a painful journey.

"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,” she recalled.

Once home she saw numerous doctors for a diagnosis, but none of them could figure it out. In fact it was her dad who eventually got to the bottom of it after reading an article about cyber motion sickness [also known as digital vertigo].

After researching the illness Fox was adamant that she had the condition.

"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.

Fox is cautious about using her phone several hours a day as she believes it would trigger off the symptoms again.

"With vertigo they do advise that you get up and go for a walk,” she said.

"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."

Trouble is, Fox relies on her OnlyFans account to generate income, she earns around £15,000 a month using the online service.

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."

[ OnlyFans is one of the top 50 most visited websites worldwide. ]