By the time Charlotte graduated from university with a health and human sciences degree, she remembers being in physical agony almost constantly.
“It felt like an axe down the middle of my head,” she says.
“Sneezing and coughing created a huge amount of pain, I felt like my head was going to explode.”
At the age of 21, in 2014, Charlotte was diagnosed with chiari malformation type 1 – a condition in which part of the brain pushes down into the spinal canal – and syringomyelia, a rare neurological disorder.
She remembers the shock of hearing the results.
“He [the doctor] turned the monitor round and showed us the scans,” says Charlotte.
“It was like, ‘this is what you’ve got, this is how you spell it, this is what we’ve got to do’, and having just graduated, it was just like, ‘right, park that for a moment, we’re going to cut your head open’.”