Always Use Clean Brushes!!!

Jo Gilchrist, 27, will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair after a staph infection invaded her body and attacked her spine.

She was rushed to hospital on Valentine's Day, writhing in pain and her body numb.

It started as a niggling ache in her back, which she put down to bad posture, but the pain grew worse.

"It got to the point I had to call one of those doctors who come to you because I couldn't get out of bed," she told Warwick Daily News.

"I rate the pain worse than childbirth. I literally thought I was going to die."

At first doctors could not diagnose her condition. When Ms Gilchrist started to lose feeling in her body, medical staff had to act swiftly.

"They told me if it went up my arms and chest I would have to learn to breathe again and it would be my parents' decision to turn the machines off," she said.

She was airlifted from her hometown of Warwick to Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital for emergency surgery.

When she eventually woke, she learned she had contracted community-associated MRSA - an antibiotic-resistant form of staph.

Doctors said the infection had attacked and damaged her spine so severely that she would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

Ms Gilchrist is determined to prove doctors wrong.

"They first said I would never walk again but I got a wiggle out of my toes and I just kept fighting," she told the Warwick Daily News.

"This has been a real wake-up call. Before this I was just going through the motions and existing but now I have a huge fight for life. If someone tells me I can't do something, I keep going because just the look on their faces when I do it is worth it."

Ms Gilchrist is not yet clear of the infection, which she believes she caught from borrowing her mate's make up brush.

She will have to spend another three months in the spinal ward of the hospital before she can go home to her two-year-old son, Tommy.

Despite the long road to recovery, Ms Gilchrist is just happy to be alive.

"I was so lucky it went to my spine," she said. "If it went to my brain I would have died," she told Daily mail Australia.

"If it went to my limbs they would have been amputated.

"I feel like I've got a second chance at life."