A Life Rewritten:

Bec Francis grew up knowing hospital hallways better than most kids know their own neighborhoods.

When she was three years old, a car accident set off a medical journey that would stretch across most of her childhood. Surgery after surgery, procedure after procedure, her life took shape around hospitals in a way that eventually started to feel normal. More normal, she says, than being outside them. “I didn’t really know what it was like to not be a patient.”

That changed at 16, when Bec got power of attorney over her own healthcare and used it immediately. No more surgeries, no more operations. She was done. One more operation slipped through a year later, but at 17, she finally drew a line. A gap opened up. She moved, had her first child at 20, and for a few years, felt something close to ordinary.

Then she got pregnant with her second child.

A New Diagnosis, an Old Pattern

Epilepsy arrived during Bec’s second pregnancy, without warning and without an obvious explanation. The cause is still unknown. Her grandmother, who lives nearby in Queensland, turned out to have the same type of epilepsy, also triggered by her first pregnancy, and has a similar pattern, also with no clear genetic marker and no clear reason. “It’s very weird to hear her say that,” Bec says. One theory is post-traumatic stress. Another is hormones and brain development. Bec has filed them away alongside everything else she doesn’t yet know.
What she did know, pretty quickly, was that her seizures followed a pattern. Monthly status epilepticus seizures, arriving like clockwork, right around the first and third week of her cycle. She was put on medication, took it reluctantly, and watched as the pattern continued unchanged. Month after month, same seizure, same timing, same feeling of pointlessness. “When I miss medication, I don’t have a seizure,” she remembers thinking. “But if I still have it, I still stick to that pattern.”
She came off the medication completely in December. Four months later, nothing has changed. The pattern is exactly the same.

The Video That Flipped a Switch

For years, Bec managed her epilepsy by not thinking too hard about it. She took the medication she resented. She had the seizures anyway. She tuned out.

That changed when a seizure got caught on video.

Watching it back, she saw herself the way her family saw her. She watched what they went through. “It kind of took me out of that little daze I was in,” she says. She started researching, and what she found did not make her feel better. Status epilepticus seizures at the frequency and severity she was experiencing are serious. People with her kind of pattern, she learned, often don’t appear in research papers after 10 years. She was seven years in. “I don’t really want to keep having these seizures.”

She’d been working in health tech already, always entrepreneurial, and the decision to build something came fast.

Building the Tool That Didn’t Exist

Curalysis started as a way for Bec to understand her own seizure patterns. It grew into something bigger.

The app tracks seizures using clinical ILAE terminology, so users learn proper language as they log. It correlates seizures with menstrual cycles, moon phases, barometric pressure, geomagnetic activity, and day-of-week patterns, pulling data together to identify an individual’s personal high-risk windows. Bec’s own data shows she has never once had a seizure on a new moon. Her peaks cluster around the waxing crescent. She can now export her risk calendar in a format her husband and full-time carer, Steve, can sync to his phone. “He absolutely loves that part,” she says. “It takes a whole bunch of stress off him.”

She built all of this because her neurologist wasn’t building it for her. Her ED reports going back seven years noted, over and over, that seizures occurred near her period. Catamenial epilepsy, a well-documented pattern, was never once mentioned to her. When she finally raised it, she was met with more medication changes and more offers of surgery. Neither of which she wanted. “You have no idea what you’re doing,” she told him. “You never even mentioned catamenial epilepsy, and it’s pretty clear I have a catamenial pattern going on.”

Her neurologist eventually wrote to her GP confirming that Bec would be the one deciding her medication to treat the catamenial epilepsy.

A Bigger Mission

Bec’s co-founder came on board from the motor neurone disease community, and Curalysis has expanded beyond epilepsy. MND patients use it to track function over time and to preserve their voice, which often deteriorates before diagnosis is even confirmed. The platform is condition-agnostic and built on research-grade infrastructure, HL7 standards included, with research consent built into onboarding.

The goal has never just been better tracking. It’s a cure.

“I want to find a cure for epilepsy, and I don’t see any way to do that except with a community of people with it, tracking it, and pulling in those correlations on a larger scale,” Bec says.

She built Curalysis because no one else was going to. But the next part, finding a cure, can’t happen alone. Every person who downloads the app and starts logging becomes part of the research. Every data point brings the pattern into sharper focus.

If you’re reading this and something in Bec’s story sounds familiar, that’s not a coincidence. Maybe you’re still waiting for a doctor to connect the dots. Maybe you’ve already started connecting them yourself. Either way, you don’t have to wait for someone else to build the tool you need. And if epilepsy or another chronic condition is part of your life, you can help Bec find hers. Head to Curalysis.com and start tracking. The answer might already be in your data.