Victoria Arlen was born a healthy triplet, and as a little girl loved to dance showcase her talent in sports.

However, aged just 11, Victoria began to experience worrying flu-like symptoms. She fainted several times and contracted pneumonia.

Two short weeks later, she was paralysed from the waist down. Her body shut off, piece by piece. A severe inflammation of the brain and spinal cord had destroyed her whole life.

Her family could only watch in horror as Victoria lost the ability to talk, eat or move freely.

But her incredible story was only just beginning. What happened four years later would shock her family and physicians alike.

Victoria spent almost four years ‘trapped’ inside her own body.

Doctors explained to her family that she was in a vegetative state. Only through being fed via a tube was she given the sustenance to stay alive.

Her parents were made aware early on that it was highly unlikely she would recover.

“We lost her,” her mother, Jacqueline said.

What nobody knew, though, was that Victoria could hear her loved ones beside her hospital bed.

Two years after slipping into the coma, she ‘woke up’ again mentally, but still could not move her body. She could hear conversations around her and wanted to react, but her body would not obey her commands.

In a situation not unlike something from a nightmare, Victoria had no way of telling people what was happening to her.

Doctors’ prognosis
By this time, doctors had discovered the unusual disease that had caused the inflammation in Victoria’s spinal cord and brain.

She heard doctors tell her family that she was effectively brain-dead. She would remain in a vegetative state for the rest of her life, unable to move her body.

“But my parents believed in me. They set up a hospital room in our house in New Hampshire, and took care of me. My three brothers — I’m a triplet and we have an older brother — talked to me and kept me in the know about what was going on outside of my room. They empowered me to fight and get stronger. They didn’t know I could hear them, but I could,” Victoria says, as per ESPN.

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Posted by Victoria Arlen on Thursday, April 23, 2015
In 2010, Victoria had fought her way out of the vegetative state.

It started in December 2009, when she was able to make eye contact with her mother. From there she gradually began to come back to life. She was able to move a finger initally, then over time progressed to waving her hand. Eventually, she was able to form words, and the words then became sentences.

She started eating pudding by herself, then migrated onto solids. Then she was able to hold her mobile phone, and learned what it meant to ‘poke’ someone on Facebook.

Yet in spite of the incredible improvements, there remained one thing she couldn’t do: move her legs.

Victoria was told that the swelling to her brain and spinal cord had caused permanent damage. She would be paralysed from her waist down forever.

Each specialist told her the same: “You have to get used to sitting in a wheelchair.”