Against all Odds | ‘Trapped in my body…’: Pune wildlife expert’s GBS recovery journey

After being diagnosed with GBS, Sushil Chikane uploaded a video in 2025, captioned, “Trapped in my body, but finally waking up….” (Express photo/Special Arrangement)

The year 2025 had started in Pune with an outbreak of the Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), a rare neurological disorder in which the body’s immune system begins to attack the peripheral nerves. By January 22, 2025, Pune had reported more than 110 suspected cases of GBS.

Two days after the Ganeshotsav Visarjan in September that year, Chikane, the director of the travel company Journeys, had woken up to a normal day in Bavdhan. He had recently returned from a three-month trip in Sikkim, where he was setting up a homestay with a Tibetan Buddhist monk. He had also visited Ladakh to climb the Himalayas. Four days earlier, he was also hiking in the Western Ghats, looking for snakes.

Sushil Chikane was diagnosed with GBS after he returned from a three-month trip in Sikkim, where he was setting up a homestay with a Tibetan Buddhist monk. (Express Photo/Special Arrangement)

But that day, working on a video from one of these trips, Chikane realised that he could not click the mouse on his computer. “By the evening, I couldn’t get up from my study chair. I realised that the entire body shutting down was not normal,” says Chikane.

Diagnosed with GBS in 2025

He was diagnosed with GBS. One and a half months later, Chikane was “crying every day, cursing myself, the medical system, everybody around me”. He was not able to go to the washroom by himself or even turn in his bed. “Except for my bowels and my breathing, I had no control over anything. Even the fingers didn’t move, the eyelids didn’t close,” he says.

One day at 5 am from a sanitised hospital room, Chikane managed to make a call to his mother, crying as he told her that he had not slept for 74 hours, though he desperately wanted to. Later that day, as his entire family gathered around his bed, his mother, Kumudini Chikane, a former school teacher, told him, “I did not raise you as a single parent so that you can want to die.”

It was at that moment that Chikane decided to fight back. As the first step, he returned to the mountains in his mind. “When I started mountaineering, I was told, ‘never look at a peak as this will stress you out’. You look down, and take one step at a time,” he says. In his years at Fergusson College, Chikane had worked as a mountain guide to make money. Following the rules of the mountains, now, he stopped asking doctors when he would go back to work. He stopped asking if he would ever be fine.

“I had become a wilderness traveller because it would bring a change in my life and in society. That’s why I work with grassroots organisations rather than big corporations. I want to make a social impact. Similarly motivated, I decided to reach out to others who were impacted by the horrors of GBS. I began a project to document my story on social media,” he says.

Chikane had heard of GBS patients being wrongly treated for arthritis. A patient even lost her vision. Chikane roped in his sister, Suchitra Chikane, and his nine-year-old nephew, Naksh Chikane, to take photos and shoot videos to help with the posts.

Most of his Instagram stories are about the mental issues that come with GBS. “Nobody addresses emotions. Everybody talks about the medical factors,” he says. A heartwarming post shows Chikane struggling to move as a voice-over says, “According to all aerodynamic laws, the bumblebee cannot fly as its body weight is not in direct proportion to its wingspan. But, ignoring these laws, the bumblebee flies anyway.”

He wrote about how frustrated he felt when he couldn’t curl his fingers. He talked about the vital role of physiotherapy. Even in the mountains, there are days when you feel that nothing is working. “You want to go back. You have to let that day pass because, maybe, the next day is better,” he says. People began to message him, and conversations began, including how patients become vulnerable to quacks and superstition.

As his condition improved, Chikane wrote every day. “People told me that they were taking screenshots of my stories and forwarding these. Strangers got in touch with me with varied experiences. There was concern, but also curiosity about how a fit and active guy like me could get GBS. Some people cried,” he says.

A few months later, Chikane was working on a long-pending book on a favourite creature, the snakes of the Andaman Islands. “People see snakes but don’t know what to do with them. In case a snake bites, they don’t know which snake it was. We had thought of writing a book for them. Whether we make money from the book was never important. We wanted to create a directory that people could use for the Andaman Islands,” he says.

With Ganeshotsav around the corner, Chikae is ready to celebrate. Last week, he took his first flight for his first safari to Jhalana Leopard Reserve. “I will be back in the wilderness soon,” he says.