This medical condition stumped doctors for years

Short Wave

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🗓️ 5 May 2026

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

One morning, Kyla Madonna Kenney woke up and her world was turned upside down: The room was spinning, she had a splitting migraine and one side of her body was shaking. Her tremors and migraine lasted for days. And for years afterwards, doctors would ask her: Did anything upset you recently? Are you stressed? Have you talked to a therapist about your anxiety? She underwent surgeries and took medications that were, in hindsight, unnecessary. It wasn’t until seeing Dr. David Perez, a neurologist who is also a psychiatrist, that she finally got the right treatment for her medical condition, functional neurological disorder. Today, we dig into this disorder – what it is, why it’s so unknown despite being a top reason people seek out neurologists and what this condition reveals about the consequences of siloing medicine.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:06.6	October 8th, 2016. That's when I woke up and everything changed.
0:11.6	Kyla Madonna Kenny is a musician. And that day, she was supposed to sing at a wedding.
0:17.4	But when she opened her eyes that morning. The room was spinning and I was shaking, but only on one side.
0:23.2	And I had a migraine that was so bad, I felt like I couldn't even function.
0:27.8	And I remember saying to my husband, something's really wrong with me.
0:34.8	I somehow managed to get to the wedding. And I was singing the meditation songs. And in the middle of that one song, I felt like I was blacking out. Days later, the symptoms were still there. Tremors on one side of her body, her right side that she could not control. And within her body, it felt like
0:55.4	an electric current. It made me feel unsteady, like to walk to see things. And the migraines
1:01.8	came through where smell, sight, sound, touch. If anyone touched me, it would hurt.
1:11.3	Kyla went to a doctor who asked her,
1:14.0	Did anything upset you recently?
1:16.0	Is there something that has caused you some anxiety?
1:19.2	Have you talked to your therapist?
1:21.9	But this didn't seem like anxiety.
1:24.2	She got a second opinion and a third opinion.
1:26.9	She talked to so many doctors.
1:29.5	I remember saying to one doctor, you're telling me that my anxiety is showing up on half of my body.
1:35.8	Other doctors had other theories. Sinus infections, so they had me on antibiotics. A couple
1:41.5	unnecessary surgeries, it had nothing to do with that.
1:44.8	I ended up calling 911 because I was blacking out. They told me that I was anxious, anxious,
1:51.3	anxious for two long years. Until Kyla met someone who saw what she saw, David Perez,
1:58.9	a neurologist and psychiatrist, the first day she went to his
	...

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