The wife of Worcester Standard editor James Iles is currently adapting to life with a rare auto-immune disease.

Myasthenia gravis (MG) affects only about one in 30,000 people, hence it was missed by many doctors until Louise lost the twins she was carrying last July when she was six months pregnant, making her condition worse.

Here, James explains how Louise's MG has affected her in the hope it may help someone else who may be suffering in a similar way and encourage people to support research into a cure for the disease.

We now think Louise, who is 27, first experienced symptoms of MG, which literally means "serious muscle weakness" last January when, while giving a presentation at work, she suddenly found she could not speak.

But Louise, a public relations manager, was unaware she had MG at the time and we were all baffled by the fact she physically became unable to force a single word out.

Her loss of speech and accompanying facial weakness were not like the nervous dry throat one might get if anxious about public speaking and, given her outgoing-natured job, Louise was not the kind of person to seize up in such a situation.

Later, Louise also noticed she was struggling to swallow food and smile and, after several visits to the doctors and dentists, her symptoms were put down to impacted wisdom teeth.

However, when it was discovered Louise was pregnant she was not allowed to have her troublesome teeth taken out in case the operation disturbed the pregnancy.

As the pregnancy progressed, Louise began to experience all over muscle weaknesses but, as she was expecting twins, doctors blamed this on fatigue.

Sadly, on July 30, our baby girls, Isabelle and Estelle, were born prematurely at 23 weeks and only lived for an hour.

And, as if our personal tragedy was not enough to bear, Louise's illness, still not diagnosed at this point, then got worse.

Even when she had her wisdom teeth taken out in August, the speech, smiling and swallowing problems, together with a now more prominent all-over body weakness, remained.

Then, on September 22, Louise woke up feeling very weak and short of breath, so I rushed her to hospital.

Doctors eventually told us it was MG - an auto-immune disease characterised by fluctuating, sometimes fatal, muscle weakness.

MG is caused by a breakdown in communication between nerve and muscle which results in a loss of effectiveness of the muscle and it can vary greatly depending on levels of physical exertion, the onset of infection or stress of any kind.

Diagnosis by a GP is extremely difficult as they may only treat one MG-sufferer in their whole career.

With MG, activities taken for granted by most of us become difficult or even impossible.

Simple things like eating food, lifting arms, speaking to friends or laughing and smiling become impossible- hence MG's nickname which is the rag doll disease.

But, thankfully, there is treatment. Steroids can be used to block out the rogue antibodies causing the communication breakdown, while another drug counters the effect of the weakening attacks on the nerve endings.

After three weeks in hospital following her diagnosis, Louise was home and taking her first tentative steps towards leading a normal life again.

Louise will have to follow a strict regime of tablets for the rest of her life but she is already on the road to recovery and is even working again, although only part-time.

MG is so rare that it is often confused with other medical conditions and it was probably only the physical and emotional trauma of the miscarriage that made Louise ill enough for her MG to be spotted by doctors.

Indeed, some doctors have since said that if Louise had gone full term with our twins, we could have lost her as well.

Louise's prognosis is generally good and we remain optimistic for the future.

Our hopes are tempered though by the fact there is no cure for MG and that its future effects on a sufferer, particularly during pregnancy, can be unpredictable and much more funding is needed for research into the disease.