When I think about what a PANS flare looks like, rage episodes, wild involuntary movements, crippling OCD, short-term memory loss, and panic attacks are what normally come to my mind.
In the past, this was my experience. It used to be that, whenever I was fighting off any virus or infection, I basically lost my mind because my body started attacking my brain instead of just the infection. Flaring, to me, hasn’t meant having symptoms—it’s meant no longer having myself.
The week before last, as I was studying for my first physics exam, it became apparent that something wasn’t quite right in my brain. I’d been perfectly happy one day, but then out of nowhere, I had no motivation to do anything, I stopped socializing, and nothing interested me. Worse, I felt like someone was running my thoughts through a blender, because things stopped making sense. The suddenness with which my symptoms came on made the reality unmistakeable: I was having a flare.
Whenever my physics tutor spoke to me, I had no idea what he was saying—not because of the difficulty of the material but because I couldn’t piece together the meaning of his words in the context of a sentence. I had to sit and think for a moment before I could decipher the message. It was like there was a bunch of sludge in my brain, messing up an otherwise functional engine, and my thoughts were all muddied. How was I going to pass the test in a couple of days?
Nevertheless, even though I was apparently flaring, I never got that old feeling of suddenly being possessed or out-of-control or otherwise outside myself—or the terror that I used to feel. I only felt that my mind wasn’t working right. Though unbelievably frustrating, it wasn’t nearly as upsetting as feeling like I was going crazy, as I felt in the past.
Although I hate the fact that I can still have flares that make me somewhat depressed and mess up my ability to think, I do find it encouraging that I had so few other symptoms this time. I never had any more OCD or tics or problems with walking. It’s a far cry from a flare I had a year ago, when I compulsively ran out of my apartment into the rain at 1:30 in the morning and started hallucinating. It’s even an improvement from my Strep-exposure flare in November, when I was so depressed that I spent an afternoon in a fetal position on my bed.
Indeed, recovery has been a lot of ups and downs. I used to hope that symptoms would vanish in a linear way over time, but this hasn’t been the case. While my day-to-day existence has slowly improved, I’ve continued to have flares even after two IVIG’s and a tonsillectomy. Yet as I was experiencing a couple weeks ago, my flares have gotten milder and milder, and I’ve fallen less far with each one.
Two days before the exam, when the sludge in my brain was making school utterly impossible, I began a high-dose Prednisone burst. At first, part of me questioned if I could really be having a PANDAS flare without more OCD or tics or anxiety, but when I had my mind clear after a day or two of steroids, it was unmistakeable that my symptoms had been from inflammation.
When it came time to take the physics exam, though my mind was sharper, I still wasn’t sure if I’d improved enough to execute such difficult problems. Although it took me longer than anyone else in the class to finish because of slow processing speed, I answered every problem and almost dared to hope I’d made a B.
And then on Friday, I got a surprise bigger than the realization that I’d flared without more OCD or tics: I’d made a 96%!
As frustrating as this latest flare was, I’m encouraged that each flare has continued to get less and less severe. I’m encouraged that a few days of Prednisone could bring me back to my usual. I’m encouraged that my flares no longer mean losing my mind. And I’m encouraged that I’m much better at physics than I would’ve dared to believe!