article: As the former intensive care nurse adjusted to life with a colostomy bag 10 years ago, one of the things that upset her was no longer being able to fit into the fashionable underwear she loved. "I could always see my bag sticking through at the top or bottom," says Ms Dames, now 39. "[Then] I realised the problem wasn't me, it was the underwear." Annoyed by the lack of decent underwear for women in her position, she decided to create her own - fashionable, but with a pouch to carry a colostomy bag. And so her business Vanilla Blush was born in 2008. To get the company up and running from their kitchen table, Ms Dames and her husband Simon remortgaged their Glasgow flat to raise £11,000, and started selling 12 products for women. Today, they sell more than 200 garments for both men and women, ranging from underwear to swimming costumes and sportswear. In addition to a shop in Glasgow's East End, orders come from around the world via Vanilla Blush's website, and the business is on target to start turning over more than £1m a year. "We've come a long way," says Ms Dames. While Ms Dames' story is certainly inspirational, she is actually just one of numerous entrepreneurs around the world who have been inspired to set up successful businesses following a brush with serious illness. New Yorker Jon Loew, 44, was facing death when he came up with his idea for KeepTree, an online system that allows users to capture, securely store, and schedule video messages for release in the future. A bad reaction to an antibiotic meant that, within a month, he went from a healthy dad to his body gradually shutting down. Doctors were puzzled, and Mr Loew was contemplating his imminent demise. With children of eight and five at the time, he was worried that they would grow up with few memories of him. Mr Loew says: "I'd be this guy that they vaguely remembered, so I started recording videos... and labelling them with the dates when I wanted my wife to give them to our children, because I wanted the videos to be appropriate with things going on in their lives." When doctors got his condition under control, the idea of using videos as a means of communicating from beyond the grave stuck. On a 2011 business trip for his TV company, Mr Loew mentioned it to his now co-founder Hiroshi Nakata, who raised a few hundred thousand dollars overnight. KeepTree has now raised more than $5m (£3.5m) from investors and has offices in New York and Tokyo. It's a profitable business and it isn't just used by people who are terminally ill. Instead, users do everything from recording a birthday wish to be delivered in a month's time, or filming a bedtime story for your children while you are away with work, or sending a video of a singing grandchild to proud grandparents. KeepTree has also indentified new areas for growth and recently launched Vift, a video gift messaging service for online
summary: It was needing to have her large intestine removed that inspired Nicola Dames to start her own underwear business.