What's Chasing Me

A few years ago, after listening to me talk about my recent runs and hikes, an acquaintance commented, "Sheesh, something is chasing you." Meaning, I wouldn't be such an "exercise freak" if there wasn't some issue I was trying to keep at a bay.  While I know there are plenty of ultra-runners and mountaineers who do what they do simply for their love of it, for me, my friend was right. There is something chasing me.

In December 2001, I was a freshman cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy studying for my first final exam - chemistry. Confident I had memorized the formulas correctly, I stood from my desk to put on my uniform, but in that moment, a wall of pain hit me.  I fell back to my chair.   It happened so quickly that at first I couldn’t process the crushing pain coming from my head and neck.  I let my forehead rest against the cool surface of my desk but it hurt to bend my neck forward.  I finished my final exam, but by the next day, doctors admitted me into the intensive care unit where I was diagnosed with meningitis.

Over the next two months, doctors upgraded my condition  to encephalitis; the virus had attacked my temporal lobe.  I remained a cadet for another two years, but even long after I had fought off the infection, I struggled with debilitating after effects.  My headache persisted, oftentimes putting me in such intense pain I didn't want to leave my bed. I spent over 150 days in the hospital over the first three years.  My brain no longer worked the same; I dropped my math major, my love.  I was handed a medical discharge, and I lost my dream of becoming a pilot in the Air Force.

I tried just about every drug imaginable to manage the headache: anti-inflammatories, anti-depressants, seizure medications, and blood pressure medications, just to name a few.  Neurologists ran out of ideas, acupuncturists couldn’t break through, pain doctors injected my scalp with Botox, and a few times a chiropractor even attempted to “manipulate my skull” by inflating balloons in my sinuses.  For three years, I lived half comatose on a cocktail of narcotics.  I realized the side-effects of so many medications and treatments kept me even more incapacitated than the pain on its own.

It wasn’t until 2007, 6 years after I developed the headache from hell, that I had a series of surgeries to implant a peripheral nerve stimulator, a subcutaneous device that sent low levels of electrical current to the nerves in the pack of my neck.  By that point I was bald from the surgeries, fat, depressed, and unemployed.

But once recovered from the surgeries, I started having significantly fewer bad headaches.  While I still had constant, low level pain, I could do more, sleep less excessively, and occasionally exercise without paying the high price of days of increased pain.  I went for short walks, then longer ones.  I began to jog.  I climbed the foothills near my home in Boulder and then one of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks.  I lost 30 pounds.  I went back to school, graduated college, and got a job.  For the first time since 2001, the pain didn’t control me.

I began to wonder how far I could push my body before my headache stopped me in my tracks.  Could I run a half marathon?  A full marathon?  Could I climb all of Colorado’s 14,000 foot peaks?

In 2010, I ran over Rome’s cobblestone streets to finish my first marathon.  I was elated.  If I survived 26.2 miles, or 42.195 kilometers as the Italians referred to it, plus the hundreds of miles it took to train, all with an everlasting headache, what else could I accomplish?

I returned to the States and my job feeling indestructible.  I felt as close to conquering my pain as possible without actually being out of pain.  I rewarded my legs with a two week running and hiking hiatus.

After the first week of my break, I had a bad day of pain that left me reeling.  My skull felt crushing. I could feel my heart beat in my temples.  It hurt to open my eyes.  I felt dizzy, and I vomited when I tried to get up from the couch. How could I survive the day at work?  What was causing the increased pain?  By the second day of my worsened headache, I was panicked.  The headache became so intense I completely forgot about my success in running and I could only remember the years I spent being held hostage to the pain.  A full week passed.  I couldn’t sleep, I made mistakes at work, and I was on the verge of quitting.  I felt helpless and hopeless.

Finally, I made a choice.  Running was the one thing I could count on to lift my mood and help build my confidence that I could live a normal life despite the headache. It wouldn't be possible in that moment to make the pain worse, so I took a chance and I hit the trails in a slow jog.  The next day, I did it again.  Three days later, I was back to a headache that rarely worsened beyond a low, baseline pain. I felt in control again, and better, the endorphins and increased blood flow actually lessened the headache. 

That’s when I became completely sure that running wasn’t something I did despite my chronic pain, it was something I did because of my pain.