Pool star Stephanie Millward has told how she fought back from the depths of despair to become a five-time Paralympic medallist.

As a teenage sensation she was on course for the 2000 Olympics, but her dreams came crashing down when she woke one morning unable to move.

A British 100m backstroke champion at 15, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis days before her 18th birthday, but bounced back to hit the top again and now, at 33, she has written her autobiography.

She said: “I called it Paying the Price because there’s no cure and no cause for MS. When I first got sick, I thought I’d been given an illness because I’d done something wrong.

“I woke up and I couldn’t move. There wasn’t anyone in the house. I was screaming and shouting and my dog was barking, trying to get people’s attention.”

Mrs Millward-McHugh, a who went to school in Corsham and married Adrian McHugh, 49, a GreenSquare housing worker in Chippenham, had to learn to stand and walk again.

“I used to drag myself around. I had a wheelchair, but it was a way of saying the MS had won. I was going through all those first movements a baby makes. I was told by a psychologist to let myself grieve for myself; I had to let myself die and come back as this person who couldn’t do anything.”

Three times she lost her sight. “You don’t know if it’s coming back, so it’s terrifying,” she said. “The first time, I was in the kitchen. I grabbed my little dog and said to him, What am I going to do? I had a cup of tea, because there’s nothing else to do. It came back after 15 minutes.”

The shift from 40 hours of swimming a week to not being able to move and taking steroids meant she went from a size 10 to a size 18.

She began writing poems as a way of coping and some are in the autobiography.

“When Adrian first met me, I was very angry. I’d got my legs back, but I didn’t have anything to be happy about. He gave me a goal.”

She won a legal battle to be prescribed interferon beta, to cut the number and severity of relapses. After a dark decade of barely being in a pool, Adrian inspired her to take the plunge. Four years later, she stood on the London Paralympics podium, the winner of a bronze and four silvers.