About 20 years ago, William Castapolis had his wisdom teeth taken out.

It didn't go so well.

I had a larynxial spasm on the operating table and when I came to I was shattered.

They thought I had a stroke.

You know, it was dribbling, my eye was funny, I couldn't see properly.

I looked like I had lost oxygen.

Castapolis hadn't had a stroke.

It turned out that he was showing some early symptoms of multiple sclerosis.

This persisted for about three and a half, four years after that.

You know, pain, optic neuritis, they gave me, they don't catch skins, they're all sorts of things.

And then one particular doctor decided to get an MRI done.

And the MRI after the optic neuritis, the optic nerve was playing up.

You know, it was going well, cloudy and I couldn't see properly out of my left eye.

A particular doctor asked me to get an MRI scan and the MRI scan came back

with a whole lot of other issues with me having MS and lesions and the whole shebang.

If you saw me then, you'd say, you can forget this guy.

He's going nowhere.

No one is a good candidate for MS, but Castapolis was an especially outgoing and outdoorsy guy.

The kind of Australian that Americans like to put in beer commercials.

For Castapolis, the prospect of gradually losing more and more control of his body was devastated.

And then a feeble trip to the hair salon.

I came to know Dr. Barody through my wife, who she used to cut his hair because she aimed to sell on in five docks.

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