Last summer, over the course of a few hours, I suddenly became unable to walk due to an autoimmune attack in my brain. If I tried to go from my living room to the kitchen, I fell multiple times because my legs would suddenly give out.

In one moment of insight during that horrendous time when I had not only lost the ability to walk but had essentially lost my mind, I said to myself, I’m going to run a marathon someday and overcome this. And I’m going to beat my best 5k time from eight years ago within the next year.

It was truly a crazy idea. Maybe I still wasn’t in my right mind when I came up with that…

For some strange reason, although I often fall down if I walk long enough, I have never once fallen while running. As far as I’m convinced, when I run, I don’t have PANDAS—I have freedom. I am in charge of a body that turned against me in the worst way imaginable. My love of running has made my ongoing walking problems far less painful to bear.

When I tried a couple runs after my first IVIG treatment in the summer, I was still so weak and malnourished that I struggled to finish a single mile at a very slow pace. But I didn’t give up…

As I started to get better, I got stronger and faster to the point that it didn’t seem unreasonable for me to sign up for a half-marathon a couple months ago. I was running up to twelve miles at once. Then, last month, I finally crushed my pre-PANDAS 5K record by a whopping 2 minutes.

Although my PANDAS had been getting worse and worse at the same time, to the point that I needed a second IVIG last month, my running successes always made me feel on-top-of-the-world in some ways.

But one night, something went horribly wrong…

I set out on a group run, and the farther we went, the more I noticed my quad hurting. I’ve had the feeling before, and usually, when I kept running, it went away. Unfortunately, this time, it didn’t.

I finished the run at what felt like a good pace, but suddenly, I was in even more pain. My knee was extremely swollen and painful. I couldn’t walk—not because of my brain, but because I was injured.

I’ve since been diagnosed with Runner’s Knee. Basically, my knee cap is not tracking in the right place, so it’s rubbing against the cartilage. My poor quad was simply trying to compensate for my bad knee on the run that night.

I’m devastated. Not only have I lost the ability to walk normally—I’ve lost the ability to run. I have no escape from my illness anymore. I’ve lost the one thing that almost always had a way of bringing me joy, no matter how bad my depression was.

Yet again, another thing meant to keep me healthy has turned against me—just like the antibodies that attack my brain. Is PANDAS going to defeat me?

I really didn’t need another thing to deal with right now. Ever since I’ve had to rest my knee by not running, I’ve been having nightmares about not being able to run. Running was my last piece of freedom, and some days, it was my only window into normalcy. Running was the one thing that gave me hope that my body wasn’t completely broken. Running was a way for me to pretend to be healthy. Running was what inspired me to keep persevering through my terrible flares.

There’s only a month until my first half-marathon. I was supposed to finish it as the ultimate slap-in-the-face to the disease that left me unable to walk. But can my knee heal up in time?

I’m starting physical therapy this week, and you can be sure I’m going to try as hard as I can to do everything in my power to heal from this injury. Dang it—I didn’t let attacks of paralysis keep me from starting to run in the first place. I’m not going to let a simple knee injury keep me off the starting line this summer!