Eight years ago, my husband John and I left our home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a holiday in New York. We wanted to celebrate having gone into business together; I was a financial adviser, John a lawyer. It felt like an exciting time.

But within a couple of days of ­arriving, we started to feel sick. At first we thought we had flu, but then we both developed painful swellings in our groins. The hotel sent us to a travel doctor who was so familiar with bizarre diseases that he diagnosed us immediately. Unsurprisingly, he had never seen a case of bubonic plague before – there hadn't been one in New York City in more than 100 years – and I think he was quite excited. He pulled a book off his shelf and showed us a photograph of a bubo: a large, red swelling of the lymph node.

We were sent straight to hospital, and admitted under all kinds of security. Plague is a possible bio-terrorism disease, so we were, until proven otherwise, suspected terrorists or victims of terrorism. Within hours the story had reached the press, and when I looked out of the ward window, there were news trucks lined up on the street. I was in a state of shock. I was in hospital with the plague and watching the doctor who had diagnosed us being interviewed on Good Morning America. It felt like a surreal movie.

We were dosed with antibiotics, which worked on me almost at once. I started to feel the media hysteria was a fuss about nothing. I'd known the plague existed in New Mexico, and that every few years someone got it. We were still young and in good health – John was 53, I was 47. We'd be up and out in a couple of days.

But 24 hours later it was clear John was getting worse. He had something called disseminated intravascular coagulation, which meant his blood was clotting and his organs shutting down. The doctors put him into a drug-induced coma and pumped him full of liquids to rehydrate him. He looked horrific. His body and face swelled up, and his hands and feet developed gangrene. Eventually the doctors said they would have to amputate his legs below the knees.

John's whole family flew in from different directions. My three stepchildren were distraught; they thought they had come to say goodbye to their father.

He was in a coma from 5 November until mid-January, and I was at his bedside every day; I wouldn't let myself consider that he wouldn't make it. Gradually, over several weeks, he regained consciousness – and the first thing he did was ask me to rub his feet. I thought I'd have an army of doctors, social workers and psychologists to tell him about the amputation, but it was just me and his sister. He mouthed the words, "What? My feet? That's unbelievable."

By February he was strong enough to fly by air ambulance back to Santa Fe, where he was admitted to a local hospital. When I first walked into our home, I thought, "Oh God, this is where it happened, where we were bitten by a flea and given the plague that changed our lives for ever."

John and I have read a lot about the medieval plague since then and the symptoms are very similar. I remember in the hotel, getting sicker and sicker, having this feeling of impending doom and darkness. That was a characteristic of the plague back then. The burning fever, the achiness; it was so accurate. No one knows why it affected John more than me. During the Black Death, there were people who survived and there are theories that some of us over here have genes from our European ancestors that protect us.

It has been a long, slow recovery for John. For such an active person, learning to walk again has been tough, but the good thing is we both appreciate everything far more than we ever could have imagined. We feel pretty macho, too. We survived the bubonic plague. That's a big deal.

There were people who asked, "How can you go back to New Mexico?" but we knew it was just rotten luck. John's brother won $27m in the Texas lottery a number of years ago. Statistically, there is a greater chance of winning the lottery then there is of getting the plague. To some, it might seem as if John got the raw deal, but he was given less than a 1% chance of survival and he made it. That's pretty lucky.

• As told to Becky Barnicoat

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