So how did this happen?

Who knows?! All I know is that I have always been a fit and healthy person, never been particularly sick all my life apart from the usual coughs or colds.

I've always been active in school. I was in gymnastics, athletics, cheerleading, field hockey, and loved the outward bound school trips to East Malaysia. I love the great outdoors and sometimes the great indoors too. I suppose some things like bowling and wall-climbing are done indoors! I usually get up to some form of monkey business, be it flying halfway across the globe to ski in Whistler or trekking across Sri Lanka and Cambodia doing voluntary dental work. I even managed to throw myself out of a plane at 14000ft in the UK with the help of a tandem skydiver. I took up scuba diving this year, and made several trips in Malaysia to explore the underwater world which was a thoroughly enriching experience. I should mention that I had a phobia of the sea before, it must have been from watching too many JAWS movies when I was growing up.

So when this disease hit, it was a bit of a shock, though I probably did see some warning signs the week before I went to hospital. I was fatigued but I thought it must have been from starting my new job, or perhaps I was coming down with the flu. It was only when I realised I was struggling to put on my own clothes, and getting my legs in and out of a car, that alarm bells started ringing in my head. I was having trouble doing normal everyday things; getting up and down a bus, chasing a bus (!), walking up stairs, brushing my own hair and trying to tie it up. All these tasks felt unusually difficult. The brain would tell the legs to move but they were just not responding like normal. The only way I can describe is like there were diving tanks strapped to all my limbs as well as my front and back.