It was pretty much downhill from there, Pavlovich said.
"I vomited continuously, lost 17 kgs, I couldn't walk or even shower myself. I couldn't hold anything down, food or even water.
"One day it stopped but the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me.
"It was all a big shock. All of a sudden I started eating and drinking again. I believed that I was fine and started to walk again, trying to get back some normalcy."
After recovering, Pavlovich moved back to the US but her mother had to fly her home within a month, as her health deteriorated further.
"Nothing I was eating seemed to be processed right. I was lacking energy, vomiting all the time, and in the end I called my parents and said I need an out.
"I spent the next three months getting tested like a lab rat as doctors tried to figure out what was wrong with me. They found that I couldn't process any sugar."
To date, and the easiest way to explain it, the most sugar Pavlovich could eat in a whole day was half a banana.
She had no enzymes to process the sugar. And it was just a symptom, not a cause; the cause was never diagnosed to date.
However, it was a wake-up call for Pavlovich, who stopped eating packaged food, started focusing on a healthy diet and relied on fresh veggies and fruit.
"I started feeling better and slowly recovered after six months. I was, however, bedridden the whole time.
"During that period, I realised that before any illness would make me insane, doing nothing would make me insane.
"I went from a very high-paced lifestyle, very busy, to suddenly being able to do nothing. I couldn't play water polo anymore, I couldn't train or anything."
While resting at home, Pavlovich decided to plant some seeds in her home garden.
"I would water them every morning, sit with plants and honestly, without it I don't think I would have ever recovered. It was one thing to focus on apart from being sick.
"It brought me closer to the world of nature and it was a very humbling experience."
The young gardener started doing research on market gardening and realised it was what she wanted to do.
"I was looking into how food was grown and I was just shocked. I thought there was a better way to do it, so I started to research no-dig market gardening.
"At this point, I was feeling a lot better, so I decided to go back to my engineering degree.
Then when the pandemic hit they were making me repeat a lot of the stuff I had done in the States. I was quite bored and decided to be a market gardener."
"Everyone talks about becoming a doctor, engineer, or joining a mainstream profession in high school, but you never hear of someone wanting to become a gardener."
