It was a Monday morning when this illness struck me and it all happened in the space of fifteen minutes. One minute I was fine then the numbness started, then the feeling light in the head. Next thing I knew I was in our office foyer looking at two ambulance of ficers and had apparently suffered a seizure. I was admitted to St Thomas Hospital that day and was released from King College Hospital almost two months later. My partner rushed to hospital from the middle of London to be told after a mountain of tests that they had no idea what was wrong with me. I had a very high temperature and continuous seizures. The strangest thing at this time was that I was so alert that when friends would come to visit I would go and have a cigarette with them only to return to my room and suffer serious seizures again.

The first diagnosis for my illness was ecstasy related illness which would have been fine but I hadn't touched and ecstasy tablet in almost over a year. The next diagnosis was Epilepsy as there is a history of it in my family but it's purely trauma related. Then it was Malaria that I had contracted over 7 months earlier on my way to the U.K. in Indonesia on a 2-day stopover. Mmmm. By this time my partner was beside himself and was watching a girlfriend he had only had 5 months slowly die in front of his eyes and the scariest things for him was that nobody could tell him what was wrong with me and this was meant to be a hospital. After 2 or 3 days he was called back to the hospital at 3 in the morning and on arrival was told that there was nothing they could do and they didn't think I was going to last the night. But I did.

The following day I was booked in for a Brain Biopsy. I had been extremely uncooperative up until this point and at times extremely violent with the staff and the only person who could calm me down was my partner. Then a doctor who had been training in New Zealand came in to visit me and I became his long lost friend. It was this man that saved my life and diagnosed me with Encephalitis of the viral kind.

I was moved to Kings College Hospital to recover and put on a rigorous course of anti-biotic's and Acyclovir (not sure of the spelling sorry) the encephalitis drug. I have very little to no memory of around that time but do know that I underwent over 10 Lumber Punches and 15 MRI scans during that period. The hospital staff were brilliant hospital I would need constant care and he had to continue working to support us as neither or our families could really afford it. The day my memory started to return I began to see people I went to school with in the hallway of my ward and was extremely frightened. When I asked the doctors they said this was normal and a good sign.

I left hospital after almost two months of which I remember very little. I spent hours picking up all our ornaments and belongings trying to remember where they came from and the event that they belonged to. Slowly my memory came back and my mother returned to New Zealand over which I cried for almost two days and then a friend that is one in a million took over the job of caring for me while my partner battled on for us.

We left London for South Africa to my partners parents a month later and for six months I concentrated on recovering and didn't work. In October of that year I went home for nine months. After nine months at home in New Zealand and finally being able to work again I returned to London to face my demons and prove to myself that I could make it out there again. And I have! Since then I have been back to South Africa and am now working in London again but will be going home to New Zealand for family reasons in two days. My partner and I are getting married in January of next year in South Africa and he is the most important person in my life and my allie in the entire emotional backlog we both have had to deal with due to this ugly illness.