'There are many reasons why I shouldn’t be here. If you’d shown my ten-year-old self my life as it is now, he’d have been stunned, mostly because he half-expected an early death. My father, who had Marfan Syndrome, the genetic condition I have, died when he was in his mid-40s, when I was two, and the conventional medical wisdom of the time was that this was normal, almost expected.' (Introduction)