Writings

These essays are drawn directly from lived experience of serious neurological illness. They stay close to what CIDP, treatment, hospitalisation, and recovery actually feel like from inside the process rather than after it has ended.

They are written for patients, families, and clinicians who want to understand the reality behind the clinical language.

CIDP Experience

These essays follow the timeline of illness as it unfolded rather than being written after recovery.

A connected series of personal essays documenting life with Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy from the first dismissed symptoms through diagnosis, treatment escalation, intensive care, rehabilitation, and the ongoing work of recovery.

They are written for people living with CIDP, those supporting someone through it, and clinicians or readers trying to understand what serious neurological illness involves beyond test results and treatment plans.

Living With CIDP: My Story of Illness, Intensive Care, and Recovery

The full personal account from the first signs of weakness in Lagos through diagnosis, hospitalisation, and the long process of rebuilding. This is the starting point for understanding the journey as it unfolded.

Why CIDP Recovery Can Be Slow Even When Treatment Is Working

Steroids that made things worse. IVIG that gave hope then stopped working. Plasma exchange. Mycophenolate. Cyclophosphamide. Rituximab. A bone marrow transplant that ended with a lung collapse. This is not a medical summary. It is what each treatment actually felt like, and what it cost.

When CIDP Affects your Breathing

Most descriptions of CIDP focus on weakness in the hands and legs. Few describe what happens when the illness begins to affect the muscles that keep you breathing. This essay recounts ten months on ventilatory support across four hospitals and the slow return to breathing room air without supplemental oxygen.

When Nobody Knows What Is Wrong: The CIDP Diagnosis Journey

The early stage of Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy (CIDP) is often defined by uncertainty rather than diagnosis. This essay follows the months of worsening symptoms, repeated medical visits, and unclear answers before a nerve conduction study finally identified what was happening. It is written for anyone still in that difficult period of knowing something is wrong but not yet knowing why.

When CIDP Takes Swallowing

Losing the ability to eat is not something most people associate with Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy. This essay describes what it was like to move from eating normally to tube feeding, living with severe thirst during a cuffed tracheostomy, and learning to swallow again after eight months without solid food. It is an account of how the body forgets, and how it slowly remembers.

When CIDP Affects The Mind

CIDP affects more than movement and sensation. It can also change certainty, independence, and the effort required simply to stay present each day. This essay describes what depression during severe CIDP felt like from the inside.

---

Essays on Recovery and Identity

Reflective essays drawn from the experience of serious illness examining what happens to identity, independence, and self-worth when the body stops cooperating, and what the slow work of rebuilding actually demands.

Recovery Without Performance

There is a version of recovery people expect to see. Progress that is visible. Milestones worth reporting. This essay is about the harder version , the one that unfolds without an audience, without breakthroughs, and without any guarantee that the effort is working.

The Kind of Miracle I Was Waiting For

At first, I thought accepting my condition meant giving up on healing. I later discovered that acceptance and recovery can exist together, and that hope does not disappear when expectations change. This essay reflects on the kind of miracle I was waiting for, and the kind I eventually began to recognise.

Identity Without Output

Before illness, identity rested on capability, independence, and forward movement. When those foundations disappeared, a different question emerged: who are you when productivity is no longer available as proof of progress?

Guarding the Mind

Illness can take many things from you. I was determined it would not take my mind. An honest essay on depression during hospitalisation, the decision-making capacity you must protect, and the small things that make it possible to keep going when everything feels impossible.

Tiara and the Quiet Strength of a Child

She was not yet one year old when the illness worsened. She stayed beside me through one of the most unstable stages of the condition. This essay reflects on how very young children respond to illness inside a family, often without understanding what they are responding to.

Dependence and Dignity

Learning to accept consistent help can feel like losing independence. This essay explores the difference between needing support and losing self-worth, and why dependence and dignity are not opposites.

The Many Faces of Pain

A palliative care consultation. A misplaced tube. CPR on the patient opposite. An alphabet chart becoming the only voice available. Pain did not arrive once in this story. It arrived in layers, and each layer changed what survival required.