Healthy woman, 29, now in wheelchair and unable to urinate or eat food after 'strange' pain led to horror diagnosis

A young woman who was 'never sick' before catching Covid is now in a wheelchair, unable to eat food, and has not urinated in three years.

Abigail Snowball, 29, was diagnosed with a rare condition known as Fowler’s Syndrome a few months after she was told she had long Covid in July 2020. Her bladder stopped working, and she suffered a liver bleed.

The social worker's life has been turned upside down since the devastating diagnosis, which has left her feeding herself through a tube in her chest and relying on her husband to carry her to the bathroom.

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“I had never really been ill before,” Abigail said. “As a child, I was always really lucky and never poorly. I look back at pictures from before Covid and I don’t even recognise myself.”

Abigail had completed a 20-mile race, the Run Northumberland BIG 20, just a week before testing positive for Covid and having to quarantine away from Mark, who works in maintenance for Nissan.

“It was very much at the start of the pandemic, back at the time when there weren’t any vaccines or much testing,” she said. “It was just tiredness like I’ve never felt before in my entire life. I remember having a cup of tea and struggling to lift the mug up.”

Like many other people’s experience of catching Covid, Abigail’s health improved over the next 10 days.

“I did get better, but I never fully recovered,” she said.

But a couple of months later, while visiting her parents, Jane and Ray Cresswell, in Cornwall on holiday, she suddenly began feeling a sharp pain under her ribs.

“It was a really strange location to have pain,” she added.

She visited the GP a week later and was admitted to Northumbria