You’re the average 16 year old teen metalhead and Billie Eilish fan girl until you get a cold. That’s when life completely turns upside down. It takes six months just for you to be diagnosed. PANDAS/PANS and encephalitis. Your mom quits her job and becomes your legal full time caregiver. Your family has to adapt. You do too, having serious absent and a variety of types of tonic clonic seizures, extreme on and off chronic Dystonia, catatonia, functional tics, mood swings, derealization disorder causing you to not recognize your own family and become paranoid, extreme OCD, memory lapses, fatigue, brain fog when stressed, increased sensitivity to overstimulation, and peculiarities about food. How do you handle this new life? Especially knowing treatment and blood transfusion and traveling just for one treatment every couple months is way too expensive for your financially compromised family? How do you react learning that due to inability to get treatment with your sickness this extremely bad already, that this will likely be a lifelong, chronic battle? That everything you do in the future entirely depends on whether or not your brain is more compliant that day? That the dreams you had for your future are no longer possible? That anyone in your family, your parents or your older brother, getting even the smallest sickness could send you into way worse brain inflammation than you already have? That you’ll have to treat every single surface like it’s covered in germs? You find a HUGE social media personality from England called This Trippy Hippy on socials, named Evie Meg who is advocating for and teaching the world about PANDAS/PANS and encephalitis as she has it too, along with Tourette’s and Lyme disease. She inspires you, ignites you with a new fire, a new hope, to help others understand those who are chronically sick or disabled and the neurodivergent/invisible and hidden disability community.

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