I love people and had learned the skills to take care of the critically ill. I'd been out of nursing for five years. If I didn't sign up again soon I'd loose my registration and have to re-train. I'd worked at Bart's Hospital on and off since 1988. I knew the hospital, unit and staff and it was great to be back. Strange but in one way, the energy of a mad ICU rinses you out like a proppa Jungle rave. Both are hi-octane. Kate and I had been together since Sussex 1989. She was 18 straight from school. I was a 28 year-old mature student straight from ICU. We were great together for many years, but Kate needed her own space, left and found her own place across the tracks in leafy Highgate. We stayed fleetingly in touch but sometimes things were raw and painful. It was the first time that I'd suffered a broken heart. They don't tell you this in school but a broken heart really hurts. I was so worried about mine that I asked one of the girls at work to record an ECG of my heart just to be sure I wasn't having a heart attack. But the doc confirmed that mine was just an ordinary pain - normal heartache. Kate wasn't to know that within months of her leaving I'd be diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Nor if I'm honest should that have been the reason for her to stay. She had her shit to deal with, as did I. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an incurable degenerative disease of the nervous system. Around 80,000 people in the UK have it. And probably more than a few more thousand people have it and don't know or won't admit there's a shadow of a problem in their bodies. Chances are that most of you know or has heard of someone who suffers from it. MS typically strikes people in their thirties and forties. The MS Society UK once ran stylish posters of beautiful nude models in shades of grey and white. The figures lay crumbled on the ground; their spines had been torn like paper from their backs. I'll always remember those posters. Back in nursing school hearing about all the different diseases you could contract at any moment; our tutor explained that people of predominantly European descent were prone to suffer MS. 'Great,' I thought and crossed that one off my list. Little did I know that although our parents from overseas where MS is not prevalent were unlikely to contract it, their second generation children were showing up in the UK with the disease in full flow. Nowadays MS is thought to be caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. More...