Aimee Campbell has said she feels like “a huge weight has been lifted” off her shoulders after a HSE U-turn on her application for homecare help.

The 28-year-old was diagnosed with Functional Neurological Disease (FND) in 2017 and is now paralysed in both her legs and her left arm.

She contacted Lunchtime Live last week after the HSE told her she did not qualify for homecare despite her condition.

In addition to her paralysis, Aimee suffers seizures, has difficulty swallowing, uses a feeding tube and has a catheter due to bladder issues.

She told the show last week that her mother and her two nieces were helping her in the house in the absence of HSE support – adding that she felt like she was “being punished for being ill”.

Aimee Campbell. Image: Supplied

Today everything has changed.

“My application has been reassessed and thankfully I’ve been accepted for homecare supports,” she told Andrea.

“So I now will have a carer for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening and she actually started this morning and I have to say already, it is a huge difference.

“Like, the busyness of the house has calmed down a bit this morning and everybody was able to kind of take a breath a bit.”

Homecare

Aimee said her carer helps her do basic things in the morning and evening – such as getting out of bed, getting dressed and getting downstairs.

Before leaving her carer helps her get set up in the sitting room where she works from home.

she said the help is a “game changer” for her family.

“It’s actually crazy,” she said. “It’s a huge weight off my shoulders.

“FND is hard to fight alone without having all that added stress on top of it so I’m so glad that I finally have that bit of stress taken away.”

Working for others

Aimee is not ready to give up her fight just yet – noting that she is determined to get FND added to the HSE homecare criteria list.

“As much of a relief as it is for me, I’m still working hard with the politicians to have FND put on the criteria for the whole country so I’m really hopeful that the people coming up behind me, in my shoes, won’t have to fight as hard as I have,” she said.

FND is a problem impacting on the way the brain sends and receives information to the rest of the body.

Aimee said she was diagnosed with it “out of the blue” in 2017.