What It's Like To Have PANS

 I don’t know if this is going to make any sense to anyone, but I’ve been trying to think of a way to explain what it’s like to live with this disease. No one can truly understand it unless they’ve lived it themselves, but I think this might be helpful. 

The classic angel and devil on your shoulders. 

The angel is your conscious self. You know what the right thing is. You know the difference between right and wrong. You know what is normal and what isn’t (regarding behaviors). 

The devil is the infection. He does whatever he wants to do, no matter how bad or insane. 

The difference between the typical analogy and this one is that now the angel is chained to the ground inside a cage with her mouth taped shut. There is absolutely nothing she can do. She can try her best to do the right thing but she quite literally cannot. The devil on the other hand is free to do whatever the hell he wants. He wins every time because there is no one there to stop him. 

It’s a scary place to be when you are going insane or just exhibiting a lot of involuntary, crazy, humiliating behaviors while your conscious self is still in there. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone, but for me, when I’d be in a full-on rage or even other times where I just couldn’t shut up saying things that didn’t make any sense at all, my conscious self was still in there not knowing why the hell I was acting the way I was or saying the things I was saying. So afterward, I would just sit there in a pool of guilt, hating myself so much, just trying to figure out what happened. I never needed the punishments I got. I gave them to myself. I wish that they understood.