"He said, 'Dad, my shoulder is crook'," Mick remembers vividly. Jack Bird with his dad Mick. "From there I just saw him deteriorate to nothing, mate. He couldn't open the car door. He couldn't even open a can of Coke. He could hardly walk that poor kid. "He'd lay down on the lounge all day, dropped down to 60 kilograms, white as a ghost with pimples all over him. I thought, he looked terrible. It was like somebody just gave me a different kid." It led the carpet cleaner on a painstaking journey across NSW and the US over two months trying to understand what it was that was causing his son's body to turn on itself.

"It crumbled me, mate, it crumbled me," Mick said. "I took him to bloody neurosurgeons and every bloody doctor in Sydney. I was ringing them at home and organised brain scans and blood tests. "I took him over to America for treatment in Sacramento for two weeks. I promised him I would make him better and I wasn't going to stop until I did." Jack's promising rugby league career was on hold and facing the likelihood of extinction. While he couldn't play, he still wanted to support his teammates and decided to go up to Newcastle with his mother to watch his friends competing in the SG Ball competition. There his father sat, out the front of their Wollongong home, reduced to tears at the sight of his son struggling to get into the car. "I was sitting on the front verandah and I watched him trying to hop into the car virtually crippled and I just started crying," Mick said.

"I said 'son, hop in the car I'm taking you to hospital'. Lucky enough the rheumatologist was floating around ... we got the results a few days later and he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, something that only happens to one in 10,000 kids his age. "He said I can get him back to normal health but it'll cost you $26,000 a year. I said just do what you f---ing have to do." For the most part of the past five years, the 21-year-old has been receiving weekly injections – which have now reduced to fortnightly – which originally set the Bird family back $500 a week. The pain he so desperately wanted to end has now subsided, allowing him to live the normal life he thought was ruined as a teenager. But not only has he defied the odds to forge a career out of rugby league at the Sharks – who now fork out the $26,000 a year to cover his medical costs – but has added State of Origin representative to his impressive resume after getting the call-up following Josh Morris' withdrawal through injury.

"I can't express how I feel right now," Jack Bird told Fairfax Media. "I've come a long way to get this jersey. I was so crook four or five years ago. But here I am today playing Origin, which I never thought of doing five years ago. I thought my footy career was over. In my head that's what I thought. "I grew up playing footy and that's all I ever wanted to do. To be out of the game for a long period of time, it killed me. I had the urge to fight back and here I am today. It's unbelievable. I think Dad teared up when I told him. It's special for all of the family." It's unknown how a career of knocks will effect Bird in life after football, but scientists believe they are on the brink of finding a vaccination that will prevent the arthritis being passed down through the generations if he decided to have children and move them a step closer to discovering a cure for the condition Bird suffers from. Despite Bird's willingness and strength to recover, it has done little to ease the concern of his family who hold their breath every time he is slow to get back to his feet.