TAHLEQUAH, Oklahoma – In front of a crowd in an auditorium at Northeastern State University, a noted TV personality, Paralympian, and businesswoman shared the story of her battle with a disease that put her in a vegetative state for four years, and left her handicapped for six more.

The event almost didn’t take place, because two weeks ago, Victoria Arlen experienced a relapse of the condition that left her disabled for 10 years.

It happened all of a sudden. Within a two-week period, she went from walking, swimming, and dancing, to being out in a vegetative state. Her doctors initially thought she was making up the condition so she could get attention from her parents. Later, doctors diagnosed her with transverse myelitis and acute disseminated encephalomyelitis.

Despite the progress she has made over the years, she found herself in the emergency room in mid-March, wondering if she was going to make it.

“I am here today because people empowered me throughout my various health challenges, and as you can guess, there were several. And to be honest, two weeks ago today, I didn’t know if I was actually going to be here. One minute, I’m having an average day at work and the next, I was being rushed to the hospital, fearing that I was having a stroke,” she said.

Her doctors prescribed steroids to treat her condition, and had they known about her condition earlier, it would have prevented her tragedy.

“It was a terrifying moment, as I was lying in an MRI machine last week, afraid whether I was losing my body, my mind, or potentially my life, again. I was reminded, once again, how some of our darkest moments can lead to our bravest defining moments. And that is where I had to remind myself the very thing I’ve spent 10 years teaching and preaching to people all over the world: Face it, embrace it, defy it, and conquer it,” she said.

In 2010, at age 15, after four years of not being able to communicate, she returned to the pool. In 2012, she performed at the Summer Paralympics in London, where she won a gold medal and three silver medals. In 2015, she was offered a contract with ESPN as a sportscaster.

In 2016, she learned how to walk, after spending nearly a decade paralyzed from the waist down, and in 2017, she reached the semi-finals in the ABC hit series, “Dancing with the Stars.”

Alren asked the members of the audience to close their eyes and imagine what it is like to be trapped somewhere.

“You can hear everything going on around you, but no one knows that you can. You are you on the inside, but the connection to this vehicle of your body, this means of reaching the outside world, it’s broken. It won’t respond. You desperately try to call out, ‘I’m here, I’m here.’ You try to shout at the top of your lungs, but those lungs won’t respond. Your lips won’t move, and nothing comes out,” she said.

For her, the worst part of her experience was being conscious enough to overhear her doctors, who had given up on her. They told her parents she wasn’t going to recover, and that they should put her in a special-care facility and move on with their lives to find some sense of normalcy without her.

“It feels like a nightmare, but this nightmare was my reality not too long ago. My world turned upside-down when two neurological conditions struck my body like a head-on collision, causing irreversible damage to my brain and spinal cord, leaving my family in absolute turmoil, desperately looking for any kind of hope,” she said.

In her vegetative state, she had time to think to herself, and she learned to be grateful, even for her ability to think well enough to be grateful. Hope and gratitude got her out of her darkest times. She told the audience that real suffering doesn’t come from life’s challenges, but a person’s response to them.

“Gratitude is a muscle you have to keep working. Shifting your perspective is a muscle you have to keep using,” she said.