After returning to London airport the two [Stephanie and Ringo Starr] saw little of each other and the affair ended as suddenly as it began with Stephanie flying off to New York. She had by this time suffered for years of mystery illnesses and a growing numbness in various parts of her body, and on returning to her childhood home she discovered that she had Multiple Sclerosis.
"At first, the fingers on my left hand went stiff, then I started dropping things and falling. Then I started losing sight in my right eye. Then I was blind. For a long time doctors thought I had a tumor on my pituitary. Then they wanted to open up my skull and look at my brain... I might have five months to live, five years or I might go on forever. The first thing I asked the doctors last October when they diagnosed that I had multiple sclerosis - the incurable crippling disease that affects the central nervous system - was, 'Can I have children?' 'Hundreds,' was the reply. The second was how to console my mother. I didn't care about myself. So I hugged and kissed her and told her I would be alright."
After ten months away from London, Stephanie returned. And this was when she first told her good friend John Conteh that she had the disease.
"Tears came into his eyes and he cried. Then he carried me upstairs to bed and brought me hot milk."
Soon afterwards the two became lovers, and when Stephanie saw Ringo again in Tramp for the first time since their parting months ago, she had already fallen in love with John Conteh. Despite this she still she took the end of her relationship with the former Beatle very hard.
"I shed buckets of tears. I've never cried so much. It was the only time in my life I had been truly happy. Months later, as my mother Dimitria - I call her Dolly - sat at my side. I started typing the story of our romance for a screenplay. At that point late last year I was totally blind. I typed for 15 hours at a time. Dolly put the paper in the typewriter and if my finger slipped she corrected the mistakes with a pen."