Prisoner of PANDAS

She tugs at the iron bars for the fourteenth time. They're solid and she sags against them. Each bar is as wide as her arm and separated from the next just enough to allow her to view a sunlit day, blue skies, green countryside, and healthy kids playing in the distance.

Bars separating her from the world. Bars permitting a view of freedom but no escape.

The dungeon is dust-covered, with pipes showing through a hole in one wall and cracks in the ceiling. She shivers in the cold, damp air.

Could it be just last week that she was laughing with friends? Dressed up with places to go? Wearing high heels? Now, it's two-day old hair and sweatshirts. Now it's listening to tears from the other cells. Or screams. 

People have gone through worse, she reminds herself. She's not being tortured daily.

But...this adventure is not halfway through yet and that happy ending is a long way away. There's more torment to come. The torments are lining up. Like all the financial charges she's incurring to be in this dungeon of disease. Like having to hire an attorney. Like being separate from friends, unable to travel or achieve her goals and dreams.

For now, there is no escape. She's the Prisoner of PANDAS.

She had had a reprieve. An 8-month reprieve. For the first seven months, she waited, fearing they'd find her and whisk her back to prison. She constantly relived the previous year and worried that she wasn't yet free.

When she began to believe that perhaps something had indeed changed, she danced on the outside of the illness and its effect on her family. She dallied with the notion that they were beating it. For the last few weeks, they lived (somewhat) on the outside of the hellish halls of PANDAS, always knowing that one tiny slip would send them spiralling back.

It was so easy to fall back into old routines, happy routines. To rejoin life. To act like everything was once again normal. It was deceivingly and seductively simple. And life was beginning to taste so sweet again. 

It didn't last long.

She ponders this as she sits in her cell, apart from her husband, worried about her children, all of whom sit or pace in other cells. This isn't the life she would've chosen at all.

She has fought like crazy to pull herself out, to pull the entire family out, but to no avail. She questions as to how she's going to pay the monetary bills. How she will pay the emotional toll. How she will hold on for years of this. She's a fighter but her strength is fading without happy sunlight.

A paper airplane shoots in through the open bars. She runs to the bars and looks out, but no one is there. She turns and picks up the paper, unfolds it. And reads, "Hold onto hope. There is a purpose to all this."