On August 16, this year Nic Chapman celebrated her birthday. “My actual birthday is in September, but this was the day I was reborn,” she explains. She’s using the language of the Clinica Ruiz in Monterrey, Mexico, where she’d endured hours of chemotherapy to destroy her immune system before having stem cells “harvested” from her body. On this day, those cells were being reinjected into her as an attempt to “cure” her multiple sclerosis, from which she’d suffered for seven years.
“Other bits of the process had been painful. This wasn’t at all, but it was emotional,” Chapman says. “It was the best bit but also the bit I found most worrying.”
Chapman, 41, was halfway through a gruelling, controversial and expensive procedure known as
