Dr. W ahid Ali, President of the Senate for 16 years, became so weak he could not swallow liquids. He talked on the telephone by placing the receiver on a pillow as he lay in bed. He couldn't move his legs and feet more than a few inches. In August 1996, his sickness was diagnosed as Guillain-Barr Syndrome. There is no known prevention of this disease.
Symptoms usually develop rapidly over a period of two or three weeks before leveling of.
The recovery phase may last four to six months, or longer. Symptoms that require emergency intervention include difficulty in breathing, an inability to swallow and fainting. As he wrote in his book, Back From the Brink, being a medical doctor increased the fears. Words cannot describe the helplessness of the patient who feels his head bursting with pain, he writes. Ali slept only two, three hours a day, and the headaches were a nightmare.