Spoiler alert: there is so much hope here…

I’d written a previous version of this story when I published my website. In April 2023, I was interviewed by the lovely and wonderful Christie Uipi from The Better Mind Center for the Like Mind Like Body podcast. As she asked me to tell my story, I thought a lot about how we tell stories in general, where we choose to start and end and how we make space for the messiness and non-linearity of our human experience. I’ve added some things to hopefully invite more nuance, and I want to name the fact that the following is a telling, not the only possible one, and it might change as time goes by and my life and memories continue to be reshaped through different experiences.

In June 2011 I suffered a back injury that resulted in a disc extrusion with neurological compromise. The pain was excruciating. I couldn’t walk, move, or sleep. It got progressively worse.

In April 2012, after multiple failed treatments, I had surgery. The surgeon removed the L5-S1 disc and placed an interspinous spacer. My neuropathic pain subsided and with rehabilitation I recovered reflexes, strength and range of movement in my leg, but I found myself experiencing persistent lower back pain, along with a strange and intense pinching pain with certain movements.

After a year and a half of my doctor not believing that the pain I was experiencing was a sign that there was something wrong, I consulted a neurosurgeon. New imaging studies showed that the interspinous spacer had been displaced and was impinging on the spinal cord - hence the “pinching” pain. I had surgery again in 2014 to remove the spacer. Once more, I experienced relief from the neuropathic pain but continued to experience persistent lower back pain.

By now I was avoiding most kinds of exercise, as it seemed to worsen my pain. I had also learned to avoid most situations that would require sitting for long periods. In 2016 I quit my job at the University, and my social life kept getting smaller. In 2017, after coming back from a long trip, I found myself incapacitated by intense pain. I was diagnosed with another lumbar herniation and facet joint syndrome, and underwent one more surgical procedure, which was incredibly traumatic. The steroids injected into my joints and discs wreaked havoc on my body, and altogether I spent 3 months in bed, and 6 more months in rehab. My pain did not improve. I was then diagnosed with “SI joint dysfunction”, and I was told it was a common condition for people who’ve had back surgery.

I’d tried everything (or so I thought) — tons of PT with different approaches, medication (Lyrica, Tramadol, NSAIDs), surgery, acupuncture, mindfulness, hydrotherapy, osteopathy, psychotherapy, therapeutic yoga, supplements, healing sessions with a medicine man, sweat lodges, Reiki, massages, you name it. My mindfulness and self compassion helped to live with the pain, and my yoga practice helped me find some ease and comfort in the presence of pain. The sessions with the medicine man helped me feel more whole and connected, as did acupuncture, but nothing really alleviated the pain. The only two things that seemed to help lower the intensity of the pain were swimming (as long as I had access to a pool two or three times a week) and CBD oil, which I discovered in 2018. Together, they made my pain tolerable most days, though I was still in pain most of the time, and often the pain kept me awake at night. I resigned myself to living with chronic pain and trying to cope as best I could with that reality.

Throughout these years, I’d managed to keep my medical practice going (with leaves of absence after each surgery and some rescheduling when the pain got too intense). I traveled, I cooked, and tried my best to not lose my life to pain. It was a fragile balance, which ended with the pandemic. In March 2020 Mexico City went into lockdown. I had no access to a pool or to CBD oil (I used to bring it from the US or the UK). My pain got worse and worse, until by the summer I was again bedridden.

I shared my despair with close friends. Three of those friends recommended the same resource: the Curable app. I honestly did not expect anything, but I thought “What have I got to lose?” I remember in one of the first audios I listened to, Laura Seago, one of Curable’s co-founders, said something along the lines of (paraphrasing very freely here): “Your skepticism is welcome. If you knew you might experience 10-30% of improvement, would you be willing to give this a try?” I thought “I’ll take it”. I started using the app somewhat consistently, and when a month had gone by, I was experiencing pain free days. I couldn’t believe it! I started listening to recovery stories and one morning I found myself wondering if maybe, perhaps, there was a tiny possibility that I too could be completely pain free, despite everything I’d been told. I kept at it and decided to join a Curable group in October. By December, when the group ended, my pain was pretty much gone.

I am now pain free, and I am exercising as much as I want, as often as I want, and actually enjoying it again. I have since traveled without fear of airplane seats, and confident that I could sleep in any mattress and don’t need to carry my pillows around. I can sit in any chair for as long as I like, enjoying long conversations once again.

As wonderful as this is (even a bit magical, to be honest), I won’t tell you it’s been easy or seamless. Recovery felt, for a while, like a full time job — retraining our brain is really hard, though definitely easier and more rewarding than managing pain 24/7. Throughout the process I experienced what are called “extinction bursts” and flareups. For a while, the pain would come back for a few hours or a couple of days when I faced emotional challenges or stress.

And here comes the often less told and messier part of the story: finding that the absence of my pain felt like a void sometimes, like something was missing, and encountering the many layers of grief that surfaced through recovery and being pain free. Becoming aware of the fact that my pain had made my decisions for so long, and now I needed to tune into my needs and desires, figure out new boundaries, and learn to give myself permission to say yes or no to activities, requests, expectations, etc. without relying on my pain as a reason or excuse to do or not do something. I’m gradually getting better at it, work in progress.

As I engaged in this work I was able to connect the dots with other nociplastic symptoms I’d experienced in the past (like migraines and reflux) and others I continued to experience intermittently, like fatigue, depression, and anxiety, and I’ve found myself grappling with what Janina Fisher calls the living legacy of trauma in my body, and with needing to do healing work for injuries inflicted by others, including significant childhood adversity and struggling to navigate a neuronorm world as a neurodivergent woman, and there has been so much grief and anger in that. It’s of course no coincidence that I had chosen medicine and psychotherapy as a profession because there were many things I was already trying to make sense of and heal.

One of my greatest challenges has been unlearning the belief that my body was broken and that I was bound to live with pain for good. Numerous doctors had reinforced that idea, telling me over and over again that I had had a serious back injury and multiple surgeries, and because of that, the best I could aspire to was learning to manage it. Becoming pain free has involved working with my identity, and letting go of so much. It’s also been about rebuilding my live, a different one from my life before back pain, and I can’t claim that my healing is done.

I’ve reclaimed a sense of ownership in my life and greater agency, and there’s so much liveliness and gratitude and joy and expansiveness, some of it unavailable to me before my back pain. I have so many more skills now, and I feel strong. I honestly did not believe this would ever be possible for me.

The process for me has involved building on the skills of mindfulness, compassion and yoga I’d been cultivating for over 20 years. I’ve been incredibly fortunate in having the support of my partner, family and close friends (including their being willing to not ask me about my pain, thus taking attention away from it), learning about the neuroscience of pain, retraining my brain with numerous strategies including safety reappraisal and somatic tracking, working on my relationships and boundaries, doing deep healing work for the imprint of childhood trauma, continuing to practice meditation and yoga, graded exposure to exercise, journaling, being supported by my Curable buddies, deliberately cultivating joy, gratitude, and a feeling of greater safety. I was also privileged to find a doctor who told me in no uncertain terms that my body had healed from the injury, and that while some things would feel scary or painful they were not going to harm me, including sitting for long periods and exercising.

My healing journey has been messy, winding, and layered, and it’s not done, and I don’t think I will ever be done, because I’m a human being in a living body. Every single day I have a ton of opportunities to practice, and this doesn’t diminish or take away my wholeness, the wonder of being pain free and what feels nothing less than miraculous in neuroplasticity.

This whole experience has taught me to make space for multiple truths at the same time, and it’s had an enormous impact on my professional focus. My whole professional life I’ve been integrating different approaches for mindbody-spirit well-being and nourishment, and after finding myself pain free, which is something that for a long time felt absolutely impossible, I wanted to help more people experiencing nociplastic pain and other symptoms. The neuroscience of pain felt like a piece I’d been missing, and in 2021 took a semi-sabbatical to do further training in this field and deepen my understanding of psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology, and integrative approaches to healing, including mindbody medicine and approaches that foster positive bio- and neuroplasticity for recovery from nociplastic pain and other symptoms, and for greater resourcing, flexibility and resilience. It turns out that I’ve had to unlearn a lot more than my pain.

My hope is to support you in expanding possibilities for living pain free and reclaiming wellbeing. If you so choose, I will be honored to work with you on your path to healing and recovery and, if you’re a healthcare provider and/or coach, to offer a space of learning and mentoring in support of the work you do.