I was so ecstatic to be coming home. My Mum and Dad threw a party attended by all the family. It became evident through time, the family home where I had stayed before I got ill, wasn’t helping me. I needed my own space, so two months after I was discharged from hospital I got myself a flat. I have since moved about two years ago and I have my own place.

I have been left in a wheelchair and my speech is still affected, a new drug that I started recently has enabled me to feed myself by dramatically dampening the tremor in my hands and arms! I still need help washing & dressing myself. The drug has enabled me to brush my teeth which was previously impossibile, I still require assistance to go to the toilet and help to go to bed & have carers to come in to assist me 3 times per day because I simply can't do some things for myself but I am adament I will be able to do more all the time. Although I do require a degree of help to enable me to do some things that I can’t do for myself I am not bitter about the way the cookie crumbled for me! Hell, I could be but that’s not me. The way I see things is it could be a heck of a lot worse. I have still kept my sense of humour and I’m still smiling!

I am not receiving physiotherapy but me and my Mum go to the local gym three times per week independently and this new drug called Tegretol is working wonders! It is making me much stronger in my legs & around the torso, my walking on my aid has got a lot better, I am getting more stronger each day. When I was discharged from hospital at the end of July 2003 I did receive physiotherapy but I stopped going in October 2003 because the physiotherapist had me in floods of tears by saying  'In my professional physiotherapist opinion I don't think that you will ever walk again or get any better than you are just now, if you were going to get better it would have happened before now.'

Who ever wants to hear something like that? The next week I did go but the physiotherapist said she had given up on my legs working altogether and had me doing upper arm strethening exercises. So I removed myself from that negative situation by going the next week and said I wasn’t coming back. I have searched and tried all possible routes and even alternative health therapy's (myself) to endeavour to try and make me better, but to no avail.