After five months in hospital, John Wardle was recovering well and looking forward to going home when it hit him out of the blue. His condition worsened suddenly and he developed diarrhoea. After tests, the medical staff said he had picked up Clostridium difficile, the latest killer bacterial infection to swamp hospitals and hit the headlines.
Like most sufferers, Mr Wardle, 75, who used to work in local government, was cured after a course of drugs. But, back at home in Rhyl in Wales, he is still struggling with the after-effects.
"Until I had this thing I was not recognised as being somebody who was miserable," he says. "But this thing had a violent effect on me. I was miserable and I wasn't looking to get up and go. I have been home since the end of June and I have sat in the garden like an octogenarian, but I haven't done much at all."
Like many other people who have got the infection, Mr Wardle had been in hospital for a long time, had been very ill and had been treated with several antibiotics. All these factors made him vulnerable to C. difficile.
He was hospitalised because of another superbug - the more famous MRSA (methycillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus). Two years earlier, he had received a replacement metal hip. Unfortunately, and again not uncommonly, he developed MRSA infection and the wound refused to heal.
As a result of this, he says, he suffered from septicaemia, pneumonia and a heart attack. "I wasn't very well," he adds, with more than a touch of under-statement. "I was in the intensive care unit for 45 days."
It was just as Mr Wardle was about to leave hospital in June that C. difficile struck, although he does not know precisely how he was infected. "Since I'd been in hospital for five months there was no question where it came from," he says. "Someone comes along and says to you, quite pleasantly, you have got it, but they don't tell you why or how quickly you are going to get rid of it."
He was treated and allowed home after about 10 days, but is still recovering. For someone already frail after major illness, it is hard to bounce back from a serious infection. "You get debilitated and lose your appetite. You don't know whether it is the drugs that knock you out or the C. difficile, but one or the other really does cause havoc," he says.
