Jude Keil spent more than 300 days in hospital with no answers (Picture: Peter Keil /PA Real Life)

Jude Keil, 10, complained he was tired after experiencing difficulty breathing. It was the last time his parents would hear him speak.

The British boy has baffled doctors around the world after losing his ability to walk and talk, with no obvious underlying cause.

Peter Keil, 43, and his wife Emma, 41, from Bobbing, Kent, took Jude to Medway Maritime Hospital in early February 2023 after a series of symptoms, including shortness of breath, escalated.

Jude told his father he was tired, but it turns out he was failing to clear carbon dioxide from his lungs and was suffocating.

The ‘funny, cheeky’ boy soon lost consciousness and was placed in a medically induced coma.

He has since been diagnosed with an unknown type of motor polyneuropathy – a general terms used to describe diseases which affect the nervous system – but doctors have no idea why it started.

He is now confined to a specially designed wheelchair, unable to stand on his feet or move his arms or head, but his brain has not been affected.

The couple are afraid Jude’s condition could progress or that his little sister, Elodie, two, may also be affected.

They have launched a fundraiser on GoFundMe which has already raised £14,449, to help pay for specialist equipment including a stair-climbing chair and adapted vehicle.

‘Pretty much every neurologist in London – and if not the UK – knows about Jude’s case,’ said Peter, a signal engineer for Transport for London, who says his son is ‘still in there’.

‘On the outside, he’s different. But on the inside, he’s still this funny, charming, cheeky, 10-year-old boy that just wants to really run around the garden, kick a football, ride his bike and swim in the sea.’

Peter and Emma on a family day out with Jude and Elodie (Picture: PA Real Life)

Jude’s symptoms were not obvious to begin with, but Peter and Emma said that with hindsight, there were warning signs.

‘There were so many minor things, it was kind of like death from 1000 paper cuts,’ said Peter.

The family were on holiday in Morocco in late September 2022 when they noticed that Jude, then nine, was short of breath and not snorkelling or swimming in the pool, which he usually loved.

A few days after returning home in early October, they took Jude to see the GP who carried out a number of breathing tests and checked for signs of asthma.

Jude was prescribed an inhaler but this did not help and he was referred to an ear, nose and throat specialist (ENT) at Medway Maritime Hospital.

He was given the ‘all clear’ after doctors carried out an endoscopy, where they inserted a camera into Jude’s nose and mouth, a procedure which Peter said Jude ‘absolutely hated’.

But another hard-to-detect symptom started to manifest itself in November 2022 which Peter and Emma only spotted after rewatching videos taken at the time.

‘Looking back on the videos you can see Jude’s right arm was getting ever so slightly weaker,’ Peter said.

‘It’s only because we’ve looked back on videos now that we’ve noticed it. You just see the arm not being lifted as much.’

When Jude started using his left arm to lift his right while getting dressed, Peter knew something was wrong.

He went back to see the GP who carried out blood tests but again the results showed no irregularities or infections.

Jude was due to see another specialist on February 9 2023, but a week before the appointment, he was rushed to A&E after choking on some Pringles.

‘He’s normally a pretty chilled young man, but he was absolutely petrified,’ Peter said.

Jude sporting his McLaren F1 driver signed cap in hospital in April 2023 when he could still move his left arm (Picture: Picture/PA Real Life)

He was given another endoscopy but this time the camera revealed trembling of the epiglottis, the throat flap which stops food from going down the windpipe and into the lungs.

Doctors decided to keep Jude in overnight for observation and placed him on an oxygen saturation monitor which kept falling out of his nose, giving him a ‘terrible night’s sleep’.

At 9am on February 10, Jude asked his dad if he could have a sleep after calling his mother and struggling to hold the phone to his ear.

Little did Peter know this would be the last time he’d hear his son speak.

‘I said of course you can, you’ve been up all night, you must be exhausted,’ said Peter.

‘Unbeknownst to me, he wasn’t just exhausted, he was dying. He didn’t have the strength to get the CO2 out of his lungs.

‘It was like he was suffocating with a bag over his head, except there was no bag.’

Jude had fallen unconscious without anybody noticing, until nurses arrived to check on him and realised they could not wake him up. He was induced into a coma and transferred to the Evelina London Children’s Hospital in Southwark, South London.

‘That was the start of Jude’s 311 days in the Evelina,’ Peter added. ‘The level of care from the Evelina was, and still is, phenomenal.’

Jude andhis little sister Elodie on holiday in Morocco where he began experiencing subtle symptoms (Picture: Collect/PA Real Life)

Jude was brought out of a coma on February 13 2023, which just happened to be his 10th birthday.

Since then, Jude’s physical condition has deteriorated to the point where today, he can barely move a finger.

‘A lot of the muscle wastage is from being stuck in bed for 10 months, but also attributed to his condition,’ Peter said.

‘He’s lost the use of his arms completely and you have to support his head because otherwise it would hang down. So he’s in a very supportive wheelchair.’

Peter feared the condition was getting worse but Jude regained some movement in his right little finger and his left hand thumb after four months.

‘So there are small glimmers of hope, but we can’t say it’s getting better because we just don’t know,’ said Peter.

Doctors had initially suspected a brain tumour but all scans have come back blank.

Peter and Jude ice skating at Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park (Picture: Collect/PA Real Life)

‘300 plus days in hospital and they still don’t know what it is and they have literally tried everything,’ he said.

Jude’s test results have been shared with doctors around the world, including in Spain, Germany and the United States.

They believe he suffers from a rare type of motor polyneuropathy, a general term used to describe diseases which affect nerves responsible for movement, such as muscular dystrophy.

But his exact symptoms do not match any of these conditions which suggests Jude could be the first patient in the world to develop this.

Despite his physical condition, Jude retains his mental capacity and has been able to continue studying with the help of an eye gaze tablet, where he can use his eyes to scroll instead of his hands.

Jude left the Evelina on December 13 and spent four nights at Medway Maritime Hospital before returning home in time for Christmas.

Peter has also taken Jude ice skating at Winter Wonderland in London in his chair and to see the F1 – British Grand Prix at Silverstone, and other races at the Pineapple Pub in Waterloo.

‘He can still roll his eyes – he gives you the best eye rolls in the business,’ said Peter. ‘It’s wonderful because we know it’s still Jude inside.’

Peter and Emma have launched a fundraiser on GoFundMe to help adapt their home and life to Jude’s needs so that he can continue ‘loving life’ and to ‘make sure that he lives rather than just exists’.

You can support them here.

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Doctors around the world are baffled by Jude’s case.