I grew up in Perth, Western Australia. My dad travelled a bit for work so my first few years were spent in Bunbury but by the time I was school age we'd settled in Ferndale. It was a fairly noneventful and standard childhood.

In my teen years I taught Kumon and worked weekends at the family grocery store.

After graduating from the University of Western Australia (Economics and Computer Science) I got a job in Sydney.

So far, so good. Shortly after turning 27 I went on holiday with a colleague to Japan, and hung out with a former classmate who was working there.

I visited the old capital Nara,

made new friends in Osaka,

attended the 65th anniversary of the atom bomb drop in Hiroshima,

and went to a music festival in Tokyo.

Then I came back to Sydney and a week later fell into a coma. Turns out the trip to Japan may have triggered an extremely rare autoimmune disorder called Bickerstaff's Brainstem Encephalitis.

I experienced a whole bunch of really weird stuff while in the coma. My parents came and played a lot of music, which made me aware that I was in some kind of dream and had to escape, like in the movie Inception.

I woke up 28 days later as a quadriplegic with my face also paralysed and had to learn how to walk, talk, eat, and blink my eyes again.

The fact that I awoke that soon was a minor miracle, and was partly thanks to an experimental treatment at RPA, which was novel enough for the doctors to publish in the Journal of Neuroimmunology (ungated version here).

Thankfully by the grace of God I recovered, but the process was tough. It was certainly not a straightforward recovery and conditions were dire for some time.

While in rehab I began typing up my memories and thoughts of the whole experience, partly to practice my fine motor skills and partly to send around to friends and family to answer their many questions.

The best part? Gorging on junk food after I was discharged from hospital to regain the 15kg I'd lost.

Also, shortly after returning to the real world I met Kerryn, which might not have happened had I not had that experience. We married in December 2012 and now have two kids.

If you are interested I have published a book about it on Amazon. Although my precise illness was quite rare, my personal reactions and thoughts during that time probably were not.

Hopefully it will become a resource for anyone who knows someone going through something similar. Read the first few pages of it (PDF, 50 kB). All proceeds will be given to the Encephalitis Society.