I Run 5 Miles, but I Can’t Walk 50 Feet

Suddenly losing the ability to walk at nineteen years old is terrifying and heartbreaking. I never thought it would happen to me, but this summer, it did. In a matter of twenty-four hours, I became unable to walk across a room without falling down multiple times.

While this symptom has greatly improved to the point that I’m only falling maybe two or three times a day (as opposed to fifty or more), it’s still unnerving. Every time I have to get up and walk somewhere, I’m constantly wondering if I’m going to go down. I’m waiting for that feeling I get in my head that tells me it’s coming. I’m watching for my legs to start getting weak and unresponsive before I collapse.

What would you do if you were me? Confine yourself to a wheelchair, or at least decide to use a cane? That wouldn’t be unreasonable. I have done both when it was worse. Would you lock yourself in your room and cry, wondering why this had to happen to you? This, too, would be understandable.

Sometimes, I do get really mad about all of this. But I’ve decided that instead of feeling sorry for myself, I’m going to get up and do something.

My brain still won’t let me walk more than 100 yards without at least a little knee dip—or sometimes, a full-blown fall. But somehow, I’ve managed to get back into running again with no trouble. Can someone please explain to me why I can run five miles, but I can hardly walk from my bedroom to my kitchen? This is truly a bizarre disease.

A few weeks ago, my depression got really bad—almost as bad as it was in June when I was nearly institutionalized. The SSRI’s weren’t working. I hated doing everything. I felt like I was “gone.” But somewhere inside of me, I wanted to get better. I was desperate to find something that would pull me out of the pit. So I decided to start running and working out, because I had heard this could help depression.

Now, I run once a week and do weights and cardio intervals two more times a week. At first, there were a lot of days when I really didn’t want to go to the gym. I hated it just like I hated everything else. But whenever I finished a workout, my mood was better for at least a few hours. After two or three weeks, my mood was better all the time. Today, I have no sign of depression at all, and I’m not taking any antidepressants, either. I really feel great.

I don’t think it would be fair to attribute my progress only to exercise.  I’m sure I wasn’t well enough to be working out this much just a few months ago.  I have just now reached the four-month post-IVIG milestone—the time when a lot of people start to see big improvement. I also know that working out doesn’t stop PANDAS or PANS. If it did, I never would have gotten sick in the first place. I was on my way to becoming an elite athlete at eleven years old—and PANS stopped me.

As good as I feel now, I’m all-too-aware that my fight is far from over. My sleepiness has gotten worse again, to the point that I need 3/4 of a 250mg Nuvigil tablet to stay awake. I had gone three months without the drug, and 125mg was enough until this week. A few days ago, I apparently got a cold or something, and my tics and chorea went crazy again. This seems to suggest that my body still hasn’t unlearned its old habit of attacking my basal ganglia instead of viruses.

But I try not to think about the bad things that are still going on. I try to think about the awesome new job I just got—in spite of ticking during the interview. I try to think about the fact that I’m going to finish this semester with straight-A’s (well, there might be one B). I try to focus on the fact that I didn’t let PANDAS stop me from running a 5k race in 27 minutes—the fastest I’ve run in eight years. Or I think about the fact that I can now run five miles—farther than I ever ran even before I got sick.

Even if I’m often sitting on the stationary bike at the gym, repeatedly tilting my head and sticking my tongue out involuntarily from the tics and losing my grip on the handlebars with “piano-playing” fingers from the chorea, at least I am well enough to be sitting on that bike.  Even if I have to lock my legs and walk on my toes in order to not fall as I go from the bike to the weights at the gym, my gosh, at least I’m walking at all.  And hey, I’m just going to take a moment to admire my newly toned running legs in that mirror while I lift those weights, and I’ll appreciate that I don’t look sick anymore.  And I’ll tell myself that someday, my brain will learn to work with those legs again so I can walk…

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