‘I CAN’T DIE LIKE THIS’

ESPN Personality Recalls ‘Nightmare’ Relapse With Rare Neurological Disease

“We have a very short window before you could end up completely paralyzed—or worse.”

When Victoria Arlen was 11, she fell ill with two incredibly rare and dangerous neurological diseases that left her unable to move or speak for four years—until she made a miracle recovery. Relapsing has always been her worst fear—a fear that nearly became a reality last year, the ESPN host said in a new interview. Last March, she was driving home when her face started to droop. “All my internal alarms were going off. I knew something was seriously wrong.” She went straight to the hospital, where her body rapidly began shutting down. She was relapsing. “We have a very short window before you could end up completely paralyzed—or worse,” Arlen recalled the doctors saying. “I'm lying there thinking, ‘I can't die like this.’” Arlen made one miracle recovery before. “I feared I wouldn’t be so lucky the second time around.” As the fear of being trapped in her own body set in once again, doctors worked to rapidly treat her. They successfully prevented lasting paralysis, but the onetime Paralympic gold medalist was in for another grueling recovery process. “Sitting up was a process again. Just being able to take steps and stand was a process again,” she said. But just three weeks after her relapse, Arlen was back at work at ESPN. It was another miracle that took her a while to believe, she said. “Mentally I didn't feel safe in my body for a long time,” she said. “It was a very weird hurdle that I had to overcome.”