It didn’t seem like much, at first, just an ache in her hands. But within weeks Deborah Campbell needed two canes to walk. Within a few years she couldn’t walk at all.
Today, she runs ultra-marathons. She also boulders, practises archery and teaches biathlon near her home in Squamish, B.C. “I’m going to have the best life that I can while I can,” Campbell says fiercely.
A decade ago, when the working mother and runner was 38, Campbell was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a rare form of arthritis that causes excruciating inflammation and sometimes fusing of the spine. She also has psoriatic arthritis, which similarly affects the shoulders, hips, knees and hands. Both are autoimmune diseases for which there is no cure, only a lifelong regime of drug therapy — anti-inflammatories, painkillers, chemotherapy drugs and biologic medications — and occasionally surgery.
Five years ago, her meds stopped working. Her shoulders had fused and her legs had gone “all wonky.” Campbell was confined to a wheelchair, forced to rely on her husband to carry her up and down their townhouse stairs, and on her two daughters, now 17 and 19, to help bathe and dress her.
“After three months of that, I thought, this can’t be my life. There has to be more. There’s got to be more,” she says. That’s when she decided: “I’m not going to let the disease define me. I’m going to define the disease.”
“I’m not going to let the disease define me. I’m going to define the disease.”
Twelve weeks later, through guts and grit, she was running again, slowly, painfully. She adjusted her attitude and her doctors adjusted her medication.
She took her first steps on a treadmill. Then she started teaching a learn to run program, not letting her students know that she was learning alongside them.
“I fought to get out of the wheelchair,” she says. “There was a lot of screaming, a lot of yelling, a lot of crying.”
She did a 5K run, then a half-marathon and then an ultra-marathon, always monitored by a physician. “I love running in the bush. I love pushing myself.” Campbell insists running is what keeps her mobile.
Next August, Campbell plans to hit the trails with her friend Vikki Kosik and cover 75 kilometres of the 125-kilometre Canadian Death Race in Grand Cache, Alta., raising funds and awareness for the Arthritis Society.
“I run because I can, and I also run for those who can’t,” she says. “This is go time. This is it.”
