I didn’t see my illness coming – but, then, does anyone? My life was as full and as hectic as anybody else’s, and I was juggling the ongoing perils of freelance work with being a stay-at-home father when, gradually but steadily, everything changed.
The illness didn’t announce itself the way illness does on television. No discovery of a lump, no late-night A&E admission. Instead, it was flu, albeit a particularly nasty strain. Then several more until, two years after the first, a final bout from which I never fully recovered. By the beginning of 2012, the London Olympic year, my body was no longer capable of reviving itself, all its energy spent, gone, leaving me with a perpetual exhaustion I couldn’t quite comprehend. The GP had no idea what was wrong; blood tests revealed nothing. I was that very worst thing: a medical enigma. “Hmm,” the doctor said. Nobody likes to see their doctor scratching...