‘Arthritis Put Me in a Wheelchair at 14. I Still Built a Career & Bought My Family’s First Car’

This is a first-person account, narrated to The Better India by Himanshika Sharma, who is living with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis and building an independent life and career despite it.

My father once carried me down a staircase because I couldn’t get down on my own.

Years later, he stood beside a car I had bought with my own earnings, running his hand across the bonnet in quiet disbelief.

Between those two moments lies the story of a disease that took away many things I thought I would have, but never managed to take away the one thing that mattered most: my ability to build a meaningful life.

Growing up with a future no one could predict

My first symptom appeared when I was three years old. Five years later, I was diagnosed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis (JRA), an autoimmune condition that attacks the joints.

I don’t remember much about those early years. I don’t remember the hospital visits, the injections, or the treatments my parents tried in the hope that I would recover. I’ve only heard those stories from my mother, who still struggles to tell them without becoming emotional.

In some ways, I think not remembering was a blessing.

I’ve never known a version of myself without this disease. It didn’t interrupt my life — it became the reality around which my life was built.

As I grew older, JRA gradually damaged my knees, wrists, fingers, hips and neck. While other children looked forward to sports days and school trips without a second thought, I learned early what it meant to live with pain, fatigue and physical limitations.

But childhood has a way of making even difficult realities feel normal.

Until one day, it doesn’t.

The staircase that changed everything

In 2010, I was in Class 10.

One morning, dressed for school, I stood at the top of the staircase in our ancestral home in Ambala. I looked down at the steps — and I couldn’t move. My legs simply refused to cooperate.

I stood there crying until my father heard me. He rushed upstairs, picked me up, and carried me down.

At the time, it felt like just another difficult morning.

Looking back, I realise it was one of the first moments that forced me to confront a reality I had been trying to ignore. My body was changing, and so was my future.

Over the next few years, walking became increasingly difficult. By 2014, I began using a wheelchair.

What changed wasn’t just the way I moved. It was the way the world responded to me.

I realised how many buildings, offices, public spaces and everyday experiences were designed with the assumption that everyone could walk.

When you can’t, even the simplest tasks become complicated.

The invisible work of living with a chronic illness

People often imagine chronic illness as a series of dramatic moments. In reality, much of it is invisible.

It’s calculating whether you have enough energy to get through the day. It’s deciding which tasks can wait and which can’t. It’s learning to work around pain instead of waiting for it to disappear.

Over the years, I’ve undergone multiple treatments and surgeries. Some brought hope. Others brought disappointment. What I thought would be a straightforward journey towards better mobility turned into years of complications, infections and repeated hospital stays.

Today, I still don’t have a right hip joint, and several planned surgeries remain indefinitely postponed.

For a long time, I believed these setbacks meant my life would always be defined by what my body couldn’t do.

I was wrong.

The disease could affect my mobility, but it could never decide what I was capable of creating.

The discipline behind my days

Mornings are still the hardest part.

I wake up with pain and stiffness almost every day, and for the first hour, my body reminds me exactly what I’m living with.

But I’ve learned that movement, not rest, helps me feel better. Every day begins with a 45-minute physiotherapy session at home. I’m also careful about what I eat, avoiding foods that trigger inflammation and flare-ups.

Sleep isn’t optional either. I protect it because I need to wake up with enough energy to face the day, not just get through it.

None of this is glamorous. It’s routine. It’s repetitive. Some days it’s the last thing I want to do.

But it’s the price I happily pay for the freedom to live life on my own terms.

The biggest shift, however, didn’t happen in my joints. It happened in my mind.

I decided early on that I wouldn’t let this disease become the defining chapter of my life.

I deliberately keep myself busy. I take on projects, chase goals and fill my calendar because I’ve realised that idleness is when anxiety begins to creep in.

Throughout this journey, my mother has been my biggest support. She’s been my primary caregiver for years, and whenever she isn’t around, my sister steps in without hesitation.

I wouldn’t be where I am today without them.

Outside work, I love reading and travelling. Recently, I bought my own car, which means I’m no longer dependent on others to move around.

I don’t manage JRA by fighting it every minute of every day.

I manage it by refusing to shrink my life around it, while also listening when my body tells me it’s time to slow down.

How writing became my independence

One of the greatest gifts in my life arrived quietly. It came in the form of words. As a teenager, I fell in love with writing. By the time I was 17, I had one dream — to publish my first book. There was just one problem. We couldn’t afford it.

My mother sold one of her gold rings to make it happen. My father borrowed the remaining amount. The book was eventually published. I never earned a single rupee in royalties, and at the time, it felt like a huge disappointment.

But life had other plans. The book introduced me to a community of writers. Through them, I met people who had built successful careers writing entirely from home.

For the first time, I saw a future that felt possible. A future where my mobility wouldn’t determine my earning potential. A future where people valued my ideas more than my physical limitations.

That realisation changed everything. What began as small freelance assignments slowly turned into professional opportunities. Those opportunities eventually became a full-fledged career.

Many of the clients who hired me never knew whether I could walk. They only knew the quality of my work. After spending years feeling as though my identity revolved around a medical condition, that was incredibly liberating.

The promise I made to my sister

One of the most important decisions of my life was made on a birthday. My younger sister was eight years old. Money was tight, and there wasn’t enough to buy a birthday cake.

Instead, my mother brought home two samosas. My sister picked up a knife, cut one in half and announced with a smile, “Everyone cuts a cake on their birthday. Nobody cuts a samosa. This is different.”

I still remember that moment vividly. I remember how effortlessly she found joy in a situation that could easily have disappointed a child.

That day, I made myself a silent promise. As long as I was alive, she would never have to carry the burden of financial insecurity if I could help it. That promise became my biggest motivation.

Every project I accepted, every skill I learned and every opportunity I chased was driven by the desire to build a better future for the people I loved.

Today, my sister is graduating from one of the top universities in our region, and I’ve been able to fund her education. She often tells me she wouldn’t have reached this point without me. But the truth is, she gave me something just as valuable.

She gave me a reason to keep going through some of the hardest years of my life.

The freedom I never expected

For years, even stepping out of the house required negotiation. Some cab drivers refused to take me when they saw my wheelchair. Others hesitated to load it into their vehicles because they worried it would damage the car.

Every journey came with explanations. Every outing depended on someone else’s willingness to help. Then there was something someone once said to my father. “Your daughter can’t even ride a bicycle.” Maybe they believed they were stating a fact.

What they couldn’t know was that no one can predict another person’s future.

Earlier this year, I bought my own SUV. I became the first woman in my family to own a car in her own name. For many people, it might look like a financial milestone. For me, it meant something far more personal. It meant freedom. It meant not having to wonder whether someone would agree to carry my wheelchair. It meant independence. It meant dignity.

As I watched my father standing beside that car, gently running his hand across the bonnet, I couldn’t help but think about that staircase years ago, when he had carried me downstairs because I couldn’t do it myself.

Neither of us could have imagined this moment back then. Life had taken us much further than we ever thought possible.

Building more than a career

The achievements I’m most proud of aren’t the ones listed on my résumé. They’re the ones that changed my family’s life.

In 2024, we left Ambala and started a new chapter together. One of the biggest milestones was helping my father set up a small restaurant of his own. After years of uncertainty and financial struggles, he finally had a business he could call his own.

Today, my sister is completing her education. My parents no longer carry the financial burden they once did. And I’ve built a career that allows me to contribute, create and support the people who stood beside me through every difficult phase of my life.

None of these milestones erased the challenges of living with a chronic illness. But they taught me something important. Success isn’t always about getting back what you’ve lost. Sometimes, it’s about building something meaningful with what you still have.

What my illness never took away

I still live with pain. 

There are mornings when my body needs extra time to cooperate.

There are opportunities I have to let go of, and places that remain difficult to access.

There are still moments of frustration. 

But there is also immense gratitude.

Over the years, I’ve realised that a body that struggles isn’t the same as a life that has failed.

My illness took away my mobility.

It took away certainty.

It took away the future I once imagined for myself.

But it never took away my ability to think.

It never took away my love for writing.

It never took away my ability to learn, to create, to support my family, to love deeply, or to dream of a future that looked different from what others expected for me.

The staircase.

The surgeries.

The wheelchair.

The setbacks.

They’re all part of my story.

But they are not the whole story.

The whole story is this:

The life I’ve built didn’t come from waiting for my circumstances to become easier. It came from choosing, every single day, to build my future around what remained instead of mourning what had been taken away.

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: thebetterindia.com