Last autumn my voice suddenly became deep and husky. My throat felt sore and dry, like sand-paper, and if I tried to talk, virtually no sound at all came out.
I thought I must just be coming down with a cold, but then I started having symptoms I couldn't ignore.
At Christmas dinner, I started choking on the turkey and couldn't get anything solid down, so had to make do with scrambled eggs.
After that, I would choke whenever I ate — it felt like I couldn't breathe and I'd have to fight to swallow. Every half an hour or so I'd also find myself gasping for breath, and would wake up several times a night struggling to breathe — it was scary.
In January, I saw my GP, who referred me to the ENT department at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital.
The consultant looked down my throat with a camera, and said my voice box was 'misshapen'. Then he mentioned cancer. My family (I have three grown-up children, and my wife Sarah has two) went into meltdown: we'd already lost my oldest sister and my nephew to cancer.
I had a biopsy and it was a nerve-racking wait for the results.
It wasn't cancer, which was a huge relief, obviously. But what came next was a shock: apparently, they'd seen tiny parasites on my vocal cords.
I was infected by something called mucocutaneous leishmaniasis, which can happen if you're bitten by a sandfly.
I'd never heard of it before and had no idea how I'd caught it. I was referred to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London in May to see Diana Lockwood, an expert in the disease.
She said it usually starts with a sore or an ulcer, but I didn't have any of those
Then she asked me to think back to any sores I'd had over the years, and places I'd been on holiday. That's when I remembered a trip to the island of Zakynthos in Greece in 2007. We've been many times, but that year for me was a particularly bad one for insect bites.
Mosquitoes tend to attack me as soon as I step off the plane anyway. On that trip, I'd had around a dozen bites, including one on my leg that was more swollen than the others.
It was weeping, so I had put some antihistamine cream on and thought no more of it. It cleared up a couple of weeks later.
Now I realise it probably wasn't a mosquito bite but that of a sandfly. The parasite had been dormant inside me for years, which is too horrible to bear thinking about
I've been told that if I hadn't been treated then, I could have died within six months, which is terrifying.
Professor Lockwood prescribed me a drug called miltefosine, which I had to take for 30 days to destroy the parasite.
This medication made me sick nearly every day, but at least it was killing the monster inside me. After the treatment, my periods returned; they'd stopped, which I'd put down to the menopause, but it had actually been a sign that my body was shutting down.
Now, four months on, my voice is 80 per cent back to normal, and apart from the occasional cough, my breathing is a lot better.
I'm still being monitored, as there's a small chance that the disease could return.
The whole experience — from the choking to the sickness from the medicine — has been horrific, and I've made up my mind never to go abroad again.
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