“Gratitude saved me the first time I was paralyzed,” says Arlen (in May 2023). “I had to go back to that again.".Photo: Joe Faraoni / ESPN Images
Victoria Arlen had just driven back to her West Hartford, Conn., home after hosting ESPN’sSportsCenteron March 17 of last year when her face began to feel odd. “The whole right side started to droop,” Arlen says. “All my internal alarms were going off. I knew something was seriously wrong.” The discomfort soon spread to her legs, and she called a friend who rushed her to the hospital. Told she was having a stroke, she reacted with strange relief: “At least it’s not a relapse,” Arlen, 28, remembers thinking.
Sixteen years earlier, Arlen had fallen ill with two rare neurological conditions, which caused swelling in her spine and brain and left her trapped inside her own body, unable to move or speak, for four years. Doctors didn’t think she would ever fully recover, but she’d proven them wrong. The thought of reverting back to an immobile state “has always been my worst fear,” she says. “I feared I wouldn’t be so lucky the second time around.”
Soon those fears seemed to be coming true: At the hospital her body rapidly began to shut down. She lost the ability to move her legs and arms and had trouble talking. When her mother arrived and reached for her hand, she couldn’t feel it. Arlen wasn’t having a stroke, doctors realized. She was relapsing. “They said, ‘We have a very short window before you could end up completely paralyzed—or worse,’ " she says. “I’m lying there thinking, ‘I can’t die like this.’ I prayed harder than I’ve ever prayed before. I was like, ‘No, God. This isn’t how the story is supposed to end.’ "
“When I went through this when I was 11, I didn’t understand the severity of it,” says Arlen (relearning to walk in March 2022). “It was scarier the second time.".Courtesy of Victoria Arlen
Arlen’s story has been “miracle after miracle” from the time she fell ill at age 11 and began her slow recovery from the effects of transverse myelitis and acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, both disorders with no clear cause that, when left untreated, can be fatal. As a preteen in Exeter, N.H., she became so severely affected she couldn’t even move her eyes. She persevered, even winning gold at the 2012 Paralympic games and then becoming one of the youngest reporters at ESPN. By 2016, after six years of intensive physical therapy, she regained her ability to walk (and showed off her new skills onDancing With the Starssoon after), and “my career entered this launchpad,” she says. She started a nonprofit,Victoria’s Victory Foundation,to help others with mobility issues, wrote her autobiography (Locked In), cohostedAmerican Ninja Warrior Juniorand earned her spot in theSportsCenterstudio.
Arlen with DWTS partner Val Chmerkovskiy in 2017.Heidi Gutman/ABC
“All that could be taken away,” she thought as she lay in her hospital bed. “I’ve overcome all these things. I’m at the height of my game, but I’ll be back to square one.” But because her condition—which turned out to be a relapse of just the transverse myelitis—was recognized quickly, doctors were able to give her intravenous steroids immediately to reduce the inflammation, a treatment she didn’t receive the first time she was affected.
It took a while for her to believe that. “Mentally I didn’t feel safe in my body for a long time,” she says. “It was a very weird hurdle that I had to overcome.” To do so she leaned on her faith—“I keep believing in miracles I choose to have faith that I’m going to be okay, and I choose to have hope that things are going to continue to get better,” says Arlen, who continues to suffer from nerve pain. “Some days I’ll be at the SportsCenter desk and I feel like I’m being completely electrocuted. But at the same time, pain means you’re alive.”
source: people.com
