An exorcist couldn't cure Jadin O'Brien but now she's an Olympic bobsledder

SOUTH BEND – Jadin O’Brien’s Olympic odyssey is implausible ... not just because she got in a sled for the first time barely three months ago.

If she was going to make a U.S. Olympic team, it would surely be in the heptathlon, the seven-event discipline of track and field made famous by Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Instead, O’Brien has made the bobsled team heading to the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.

The 23-year-old Notre Dame graduate has overcome injury to every part of her body, and once she nearly had a titanium rod inserted in her leg.

Yet it is her mind that has healed most emphatically.

She overcame a mysterious illness known as PANDAS -- Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections.

It is a rare condition, and not universally agreed upon, in which children develop neuropsychiatric symptoms following a streptococcal infection. Commonly known as strep, the infection affects the throat and tonsils but can spread elsewhere and cause serious complications.

No one knew what was wrong with little Jadin. Not psychiatrists nor physicians. Not parents nor siblings. Not teachers nor friends. Not even an exorcist.

Jadin’s symptoms worsened from the ages of 5 to 10, until her parents finally found a doctor willing to put their daughter through holistic treatments.

The strep was eliminated. Jadin came back.

“I would describe it as I got a light in my eye again,” she said. “I was able to look at life and be interested in things, smile with people and talk to people, and actually think without being absolutely terrified of everything.”

At the Winter Olympics, she will push a sled driven by five-time Olympic medalist Elana Meyers Taylor, 41, who made the U.S. team for the fifth time — and has medaled in all four of her previous appearances. The four runs are scheduled for Feb. 20-21.

Other American women from track and field have won global medals in bobsled, notably hurdler Lolo Jones and sprinter Lauryn Williams.

At O’Brien’s World Cup debut in Sigulda, Latvia, she and Meyers Taylor finished fourth. So an Olympic medal is not out of the question.

O’Brien, a native of Pewaukee, Wis., is the second of seven children born to Kevin O’Brien and Leslie (Moorman) O’Brien. It is an athletic family. A sister, Caitlyn, won an NAIA long jump title just days before Jadin won a third NCAA indoor pentathlon.

The parents met at Bowling Green University. Her father was a linebacker who signed with a couple of NFL teams and played in the World League and Canadian Football League. Her mother belongs to Ohio’s track hall of fame, winning four state titles during an unbeaten career in the 300-meter hurdles.

O’Brien’s pentathlon score ranked fourth in the world last year, and would have been nearly enough for a bronze medal at the World Indoor Championships.

Out of high school, she would have been recruited in basketball, in which she led her high school team to a Wisconsin final four, or in soccer.

She developed strep as a child. PANDAS symptoms -- obsessive-compulsive disorder, tics, depression, sleep disturbances, motor or sensory problems – occurred in her as early as age 5. Thoughts about death surfaced, before children usually know what death is.

“Terror was a constant feeling I felt daily,” she said. “As a kid, I mean, that shouldn’t happen. It was terror in every aspect of my life.”

She was taken to a priest, Father Cliff Ermatinger, the exorcist of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. He prayed over her.

“Nothing happened,” Jadin aid, “because I wasn’t possessed.”

A teacher at her small Pewaukee school, Trinity Academy, told the family about a friend whose son had similar symptoms. A holistic doctor tested the girl for strep. Not only was the strep there, Jadin said, it was everywhere.

“Liver, bladder and gut,” she said.

Gut health affects mental health. Antibiotics and a natural treatment killed off the strep within eight weeks, the mother said.

O’Brien said she can’t identify a specific moment in which she felt normal. It was gradual.

“My whole life, really, has been overcoming odds,” she said. “Overcoming things that should have stopped me but didn’t, and actually fueled me.”

After disclosing the PANDAS trauma, Jadin said, she was thanked by respondents on social media. For someone who portrays herself as “hard as rock,” it was a vulnerability she doesn’t ordinarily show. She said she doesn’t often dwell on that period of her life because she doesn’t know what might surface.

“I think if I actually unpacked what happened and then kind of look at it and see how it’s affected my life now, I’d find some interesting things,” she said. “But I guess I look at it now like what good has come from it.

“I would say the resilience part, the story, being a witness, being a hope for people.”

Contact IndyStar correspondent David Woods at [email protected]. Follow him on X : @DavidWoods007.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Jadin O'Brien is an Olympic bobsledder after battling PANDAS