lauraseago

All throughout college, I would go on daily runs. It was my quiet time, and I couldn’t go more than two days without one. They kept me sane and calm in the midst of whatever was happening around me. Even today, when I’m cranky, “why don’t you go for a run” is my mother’s way of telling me that I need a reality check.

In my senior year of college, I decided to take my running hobby to the next level and train for a half marathon. I maintained a strict, but gradual schedule that would allow me to increase my mileage without injury… or so I thought.

One day, I set out for an easy training day in my schedule. Less than half a mile into the run, everything changed. A searing pain surged through the sides of my right knee, clenching the surrounding muscles and locking my leg into place. There was no fall, no “ pop," no explanation - just intense, mind-boggling pain. From that moment, I could hardly walk. I hobbled home, hopping on my left leg most of the way. I started to cry as I sat down in the grass, frightened and confused by what was going on.

For the next seven years of my life, I couldn’t run more than two miles without both of my knees locking up, and the same searing pain coursing through my legs.

Devastated by the loss of running in my daily schedule, I set out to fill the void in my exercise routine with spin class. I came to rely on spin the same way I had relied on running - it became vital to my mental health.

But a few years after I took up spinning, and eerily familiar pain started to rear its head - this time in my back. Every time I sat down on a bike seat, it felt like imaginary spears were being thrust into my lower back and buttocks. The nerve pain was so terrifying and crippling that I could hardly sit in my desk chair, let alone get the exercise my body was craving. I sat at home and cried for days, baffled at how my body had become so broken by my mid-20s.

The words IT band syndrome, pulled muscles, bad knees, bad genes, sciatica, and lower back pain became commonplace in my daily life. I bounced around to different physicians, chiropractors, massage therapists, healers, and personal trainers with the hope that I could one day achieve half of the physical capacity I used to have.

I learned to live my life around the pain - pushing my body to run a mile here and there, attending one spin class a week instead of three, avoiding all types of lunges and squats. By this time, I was convinced that nothing was going to fix me… I would just have to ride the wave of my body’s steady decline.

But the worst was still to come.

As my physical activity levels began to shrink, my devotion to my career grew. I poured myself into my job, working long New York City hours and caring way too much about every email I wrote. But before long, the pain found me again. This time, in my head.

The headaches began slowly - 4-5 hours of pain, slightly eased by a few ibuprofen. But the more I tried to keep working and “power through,” the louder my body screamed. I asked to turn the lights off during all of my meetings, and began taking up to 12 ibuprofen per day. I bounced from doctor to doctor searching for answers, and finding none.

Over the course of five years, things got much worse. The worse they got, the less power I had to do anything. I started heading home the second I felt the tidal wave of pain coming. I got worried that I wouldn’t make it home in time - that I’d have to lay down in the snow on the streets. None of the migraine drugs seemed to work for me, but I took them anyway. $30 a pill was a small price to pay for a sliver of hope to make the pain go away.

At their peak, my migraines lasted for a full 48 hours, during which I was completely disabled. I sat in my apartment with the lights off and the curtains drawn for two days straight, wearing earplugs and closing my eyes. I could hardly keep down food with the intense nausea. Most of the time, I was in too much pain to fall asleep.

I begged the neurologist for Botox, but I didn’t have enough migraines per month to qualify. I was at my wit’s end, and I felt completely hopeless.

After a while, I decided to make some changes in my stress levels. I quit my job and moved from New York to Chicago. I found a new chiropractor there, and was in the market for a new physician to recommend migraine solutions.

“You should try this doctor my mom sees,” my coworker John told me. “He has a cult following, and I know he cured some lady’s migraines. It’s at least worth a shot."

I agreed to go to see him, not sure what to expect, and with no clue that this office visit would change the course of my life.

On my first visit, Dr. Stracks explained the concept of mindbody pain to me. He gave me some worksheets, recommended a few books, and suggested that I join a discussion group he was hosting at Northwestern in the coming weeks. I wasn’t sure how some worksheets and a discussion group were going to cure my migraines, but at that point, I was willing to try anything. So I did.

A month into the process, I stopped getting full migraine attacks. They started lasting 8 hours instead of 48, then 4 hours, then two. I began to run - just a couple of miles at first, but slowly building up to four. By the end of the three month discussion group, I was in the same physical health I had been at in college. No migraines, no sciatica, no knee pain. My symptoms dissolved completely.

Throughout the healing process, I became plagues by a simple question: Why don’t more people know about this?

After much discussion, research, and whiteboarding, that question turned into Curable. If you're not familiar with it, Curable is the TMS app that helps you through the process of recovery. If you ARE familiar with Curable, you may recognize my voice from the audio lessons

I also host our podcast - "Like Mind, Like Body" where I interview people who know way more about science than I do about the mind body connection.