I'm from Singapore, have been in Australia for the past 20 years. We came in 1983 or 84. My daughter was born here. I've two other children prior to my daughter. They were both born in Singapore.

According to the paediatrician, [my daughter] was born normal.... When she was four and a half she was in the hospital for a long, long time...She had a long illness, a long sickness. Instead of progressing, she was getting worse. She was regressing. She was sick, had [a] high fever for a long, long time. And we kept taking her to the doctor.

Then came a stage when she was crawling around..... We got a fright because we thought, "hey, something is very wrong here." So I went to the doctor, but the doctor said that I was an overanxious mum. But if you're with your child every day you know there is something terribly wrong. How can a child that's walking [suddenly] regress, crawling on the floor? There must be something wrong. Why has she regressed?

So my then-husband and I decided we were going to take her to Princess Margaret hospital. They wouldn't listen to us because we had no doctor referral. The GP we were seeing was, I think, not very interested in the case, or he was just too busy. It was a Friday, I remember. And we were at the hospital until 1.30 before they would admit her. We waited and waited... They said we had to pay for the MRI. Even if I had to sell my house I had to find out what was wrong with my daughter... They found out something was wrong with her....

The first time she was in hospital for 3 or 4 months. And even in that stage they didn't know what was wrong with her. They gave her a lot of antibiotics intravenously, they gave her a spinal tap, they did a lot of exploratory things. I then decided [to take her] out of hospital…

Even 3 years later they could not tell me what was wrong with my child..... In year 3 she was bad again.... Then we [finally] found out that she has juvenile chronic rheumatoid arthritis... So we started this whole progression of treatment. In those early days, everything was experiment[al].... Princess Margaret [hospital] was a second home.