For three years, it lived in the background slow enough that we would tell ourselves we were managing it. A bad day or week here and there. You don't realise you're already living inside a slow-motion crisis until the ground actually gives way.

Then, within a few months, it did.

What had been occasional became constant. The bad days turned into full paralysis weeks. The hospital stays that used to be rare became a fixture of our lives. I remember the exact feeling of watching someone I loved go from coping to collapsing, and how disorienting it was that it happened so fast after years of it happening so slowly. It was like the world had been rolling steadily downhill and then someone let go of the brake entirely.

He was a paramedic - the one who ran toward emergencies, not the one having them. Watching him go from fully capable to needing me to catch him, physically, in the space of a few months, broke something in me I didn't have words for. There was no time to adjust gradually. One month he was still pushing through shifts, terrified but managing. A few months later, he couldn't stand long enough to make a cup of tea.

Getting the diagnosis of the rare neuromuscular condition hypokalemic periodic paralysis should have brought relief, and for a moment it did finally, a name, after a year of being dismissed, misdiagnosed, told the scans were clear so it must be nothing. But it was just the beginning.

We have a young child, and that's where the speed of it hit hardest. There wasn't a gentle transition where our child slowly got used to a different kind of dad. One season he was down on the floor building towers and carrying her on his shoulders. Not long after, he physically couldn't

I became the one doing bedtime, park trips, the floor time, almost overnight. Not because we planned it, but because there was no room to plan anything; it moved too fast for that. I look back and struggle to pinpoint the week things changed, only that they did, and suddenly I was doing alone what we used to do together.

There's a specific kind of grief in watching someone lose their body quickly rather than slowly. Slow, you adapt in small steps. Fast, you're just holding on, trying to catch up to a version of your life that's already gone. I grieved the dad he was to our daughter three months earlier. I grieved the version of him that could still stand at the sink doing dishes while I got her ready for bed. None of it feels like it happened at a pace a person should have to process.

We're still adjusting to how quickly everything shifted, even now. Some days it still feels like the world stopped and we're the only ones who noticed. But we're learning him, in relearning what his body can do; me, in relearning what showing up looks like when it all changes overnight; and her, in her own small way, learning that love doesn't look the same every day, and that's okay.

If this happens to your family too fast, after years of slow warning signs, know that the whiplash is real. You're allowed to grieve how quickly it moved, even while you're grateful to finally have answers. You don't have to catch up all at once. You just keep going, together, one changed day at a time.