My health story - July 29, 2025

I have been on a pretty long and crazy health journey, and now that I've figured out a lot of important things and recovered in big ways, I thought I would write about it. I want this page to be a one-stop place for people who may have zero history of my past as well as those who have followed along at different points but are trying to connect the dots or learn about my current condition. Spoiler alert, my current condition is about 95% better than it was at its worst, and I'm back to rock climbing, guitar, fire spinning, and using my arms for whatever I feel like. Thanks Nichole Sachs!

Before

My health problems began when I was 31, but before then I lived a pretty healthy life with a decent amount of physical activity. In high school, I started climbing a LOT, especially when I joined a climbing team. I kept up with it right up until my problems began. I also bike commuted to work, played guitar, did lots of fire spinning, and was on a computer often for work as I was a software developer. It felt like I didn't have any substantial health issues, so I considered myself lucky.

Ow

In May of 2020, while typing for work, I suddenly experienced excruciating pain in both of my forearms. It was so painful, so immediate, and so obviously wrong, that I had to stop working immediately and go on medical leave and disability.

For the next 5 years, my symptoms generally followed a pattern of: when not flared up, experiencing a steady baseline pain that spiked periodically, which would routinely disrupt sleep. If I used my arms for anything substantial, I'd flare up my nerves, and it would take between 2-3 weeks to calm them down again. Flareups had a much higher baseline level of pain. In order to prevent flareups, I would minimize arm usage to just showering, brushing teeth, eating, and maybe some phone usage. At its worst, it would hurt to walk, lie down, talk with a loud voice, ride in a car, use my phone, and so much more. I had many complicated boundaries for what was safe for me to do.

I was diagnosed with many things over the years. Carpal tunnel syndrome (never had it), cubital tunnel syndrome (never had it), thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS) (had it), and complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) (probably had it). There were more, but these are maybe the biggest ones.

I'm going to condense a LOT of information for now, and just say that for most of May 2020 to April 2025, I believed that I suffered only from thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS). Now with the benefit of hindsight, I'd still say that TOS was a large culprit, but there was an emotional and neuroplastic dimension to my chronic pain which by the end of that period (April 2025) accounted for the majority of the pain that I was experiencing. It's very difficult to know the exact split of how much was structural pain and how much was emotional/neuroplastic/disregulated nervous system pain. I don't worry too much about understanding this split; I just know that all of those elements were at play to some degree from start to finish. More on all of these concepts later!

Following an MRI in 2021 I was told that I had bilateral (both sides) neurogenic (affecting nerves) and venous (affecting the blood veins) thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS). Essentially, in TOS, the bundle of nerves and blood vessels that feed into your arm are compressed by the first rib which causes pain and other problems. As a result of the MRI and the severity of its findings, it was recommended that I undergo surgery.

The surgery is called a first rib resection (FRRS) in which they remove your first (topmost) rib. This involves disconnecting several muscles in the neck (scalenes, accessory breathing muscles) as well. They also snipped the pec minor muscle since that can contribute to the compression. The surgery is a huge one because of its proximity to the lungs and nerves. Much can go wrong. They don't do two sides at once, so I did it once on the left side in June 2021 and again on the right side in October 2021.

The left side surgery went really well. In the hours, days, and months following that surgery I said things like "I can't complain". It felt surprisingly the same once my shoulder unstiffened from being immobilized for a little while.

The right side surgery went exceptionally poorly. In hindsight, this is when I may have gotten complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). For over a month, my right arm was inflated with fluid (edema). I couldn't remotely close my fist. I was in agony a lot of the time. If my right arm touched anything, it hurt, so I sought to find positions in which I could hang my arm and have it contact as little as possible. When the edema finally subsided, the right side of my body including the pec, shoulder, bicep, forearm, etc had all visibily atrophied. There are many stories from this period, but I can summarize them by saying: "ow".

Maybe 3-6 months later, the worst of those symptoms had begun to subside, and I was left in a place very similar to where I started: if I attempted to use my arms for anything substantial, they would flare up and be in consistent pain for about 2 weeks or so until they calmed back down.

Ugh

In 2022, following those surgeries, I was told that it could take up to 2 years to get back to a good place. Of course I was told other things too, like my surgeon telling me I'd be climbing within a year. Yeah, that didn't happen...

I would characterise the period after the surgeries, let's say January 2022 to April 2025 as somewhat samey. There were plenty of ups and downs in actuality. I even returned to work, doing my software development work entirely by voice, but then experienced a huge set of flareups and wave of new symptoms in November 2023 that put me firmly back on disability.

Still, I can lump this large ~3 year span of time into a relative plateau of not being physically or mentally healthy, but doing my best to get on with life in ways I could, and try to make peace with the fact that I would never climb, play guitar, fire spin, etc again.

Whaaa??

Finally, I read the book that changed everything for me, to my continual astonishment. After seeing my neurologist again, she recommended a new book: Mind your Body by Nichole Sachs. She said that the mind-body approach outlined in the book was helping a lot of people cure their chronic pain.

Maybe your hippy-dippy/woo-woo alarm is going off, or has been for some time up to this point. That might have been me, but I'm glad: 1. I'd become continually more open minded over time about alternative modalities, 2. that I was at such a desperate place that it just didn't matter, and 3. that Nichole Sachs is sooo good at making the argument that mind body conditions are very real. I was ready to receive whatever wisdom was in this book.

The eventual, incredible, and very tangible changes in my body have ended up being my irrefutable proof that this stuff is real.

So what are we talking about? Well, in my own words let me try to teach you what I learned.

Mind-body

You know when you have to make a speech, and you get butterflies in your stomach? Maybe you get a little nauseous?

Or how about when you're so stressed that you get a headache, or wake up covered in hives (this happened to me!).

Or maybe you've got more personal examples of emotions leading to acute conditions in your body. Maybe it's that your brain tends to shut off and makes you feel really tired when you're in a social situation you wish you weren't in. Bed time I guess! But then you get in bed and feel pretty dang awake...

The pattern here is that we all can relate with the concept that your emotional state can lead to bodily symptoms in these SHORT term examples. This is the "acute" part. So why then is it such a foreign and unbelievable concept that chronically distressed emotional states could lead to chronic physical symptoms?

This is what happened to me: a chronic state of emotional distress led to the chronic manifestation of physical symptoms.

It has happened to many people it turns out, and if you just for fun put aside any skepticism and entertain my claims as true, it might just connect a lot of dots. There have been so many stories of people experiencing miraculous cures from methods considered dubious by the western medical community. But if we just said that emotional distress can cause physical symptoms, and if what underlies those "dubious" methods is some kind of process that affects the patient emotionally, then that change can lead to healing.

Here's some more dots I feel I've connected. Think of all of those conditions which list as a risk factor "stress", and how a doctor says to reduce stress in order to help ease a symptom. It's actually a LOT of conditions that we know can be exacerbated by stress. That fact alone points back to the broader claim I've made here: chronic negative emotions can lead to chronic physical symptoms.

To me, western medicine just hasn't quite caught up to the power of mind body medicine because of the very real difficulties in measuring results in an objective way. When we're talking about emotions and pain levels, these things are notoriously difficult to quantify, and so drawing conclusive results is hampered.

But anecdotally, there are a LOT of people who are curing health problems with the mind-body approach (which I'll describe shortly): people have cured their nerve pain, chronic fatigue syndrome, psoriasis, cyclical vomiting... the list is long. But maybe it doesn't seem likely that these conditions could have been caused ultimately by emotions? Reasonable, and I do believe these conditions are real and are sometimes structural in nature, where a mind-body approach won't completely resolve them. For instance, sometimes you have compression of a nerve, and mind body medicine can't relieve that very real structural issue. Importantly, Nicole Sachs and other advocates for this type of medicine would NOT make claims otherwise. Sometimes, the problem is structural, and sometimes it's emotional or neuroplastic in nature, which requires a different treatment. It seems to me like oftentimes there is a structural and emotional component which means multiple treatments is ideal.

So if it doesn't seem likely to you that the above listed chronic conditions could be caused by emotional problems, think about the acute conditions I described at the beginning of this section and compare to these more chronic versions of those symptoms, eg feelings of nausea -> chronic nausea conditions, feelings of fatigue -> chronic fatigue syndrome. Wouldn't it be reasonable to believe that there is a chronic analogue to those acute conditions, when the emotional problem is itself a long lived and chronic thing too?

How it works

The book Mind your Body by Nicole Sachs describes this chronically disregulated nervous system / emotionally distressed condition as tension myoneural syndrome (TMS), but the name of the condition isn't important. Let's just start with a few key terms defined in a very reductive way here:

1. Nervous system. The entity inside you that is responsible for keeping you safe
2. Emotional reservoir. An internal reservoir which holds negative feelings, such as dread, despair, grief, terror, rage, shame, etc.

Let's talk about the emotional reservoir. This is where one stuffs their feelings. It fits an intuitive model that we reference when we say stuff like "he bottles up his emotions" or "she needs to let off some steam". It's the idea that your negative emotions build up in some kind of container inside of you, and need release.

I grew up always bottling my negative emotions. At some point I learned that showing these emotions was strictly bad. By voicing anger or fear, I thought I was just inviting more of that emotion into existence. So I rarely voiced my fears, anger, sadness, etc, except when it became too much to contain, and then it spilled out in uncontrolled waves. Not the best way to go about life.

Nicole Sachs describes what happens when you fill up your emotional reservoir as follows. Eventually, you have so much negative emotion bottled up that you can't really get away from it. Let's say you've got this sense of despair about the state of politics. Well, any number of news headlines or friends' off-handed mentioning of some political event would direct your mind, at least in some small and subconscious way, back to the bottled up despair. So a seemingly innocuous comment by a loved one about the news might trigger feelings of despair.

When this happens often enough, your nervous system (the other entity defined above) takes notice. It says "Hey, when you think about this stuff, you feel BAD. This stuff is dangerous." And what does the nervous system do to communicate danger? It can do lots of things, but primarily it delivers pain.

Why pain? Think about how any cut simply hurts to alert you to the danger that wound represents. Or how getting your hand too close to a stove similarly is a signal from the nervous system, saying "This is dangerous! Please stay away from the danger. Thank you." Pain is the primary way that the nervous system protects you from danger.

This is the essential mechanism that a chronically full emotional reservoir triggers. It can trigger your nervous system to send pain signals (or maybe it's fatigue signals as in the case of chronic fatigue syndrome, etc) upon experiencing those negative emotions too often.

Learned pain

Now, when you feel chronic pain, something additional happens. Neurologists will say "nerves that fire together, wire together" to describe the phenomenon of neuroplasticity. What this is saying is, when things happen to occur together, our brains and neural tissue has this habit of wiring those things together. When it happens a lot, there are lots of opportunities to wire those things together really well. This is what happens when you practice doing something and then get better at it - it is how our brains learn.

So in this case, neurons are literally learning the pain. When the nervous system detects extreme negative emotions from a too full emotional reservoir, it triggers pain as mentioned above. When this keeps happening, then that association becomes a learned response wired into our nervous system. This has a name: neuroplastic pain.

The crazy thing is that this pain is exactly as real as normal, structural pain. In both cases, the pain signals end up in the same place in your central nervous system (brain), giving the same message. Nicole says "the pain is not in your head, but the solution is not in your body". To be honest, I find this statement very difficult to reason about.

If someone asked me, "so it was all in your head?" I might reply "Yeah, because ALL pain is in your head". And then I'd probably expand on that with lots more words and examples of lived experience.

One thing I like to share is how utterly astounding it can be to learn how deeply pain can be learned. You may imagine my experience in my head as like:

"Geez I'm uncomfortable. Oh, was that a little tickle on my arm? Oh is my arm in pain? Omg I think my arm hurts. It totally hurts. My arm is on FIRE."

Like, somehow convincing myself on a concious level through some anxiety-led stream of consciousness thought process that I'm in pain and as a result mainfesting that pain. This is NOT how it works. At all. It's wayyy deeper and more astounding than any of that.

Instead let's use an example. Imagine you're Ben who is very tired. Deeply tired. All you want to do is sleep. You are in bed, and comfortable, in no pain at the moment. It feels so right not to be moving, in that way where every part of your body and mind seem to completely agree that: it is now time to sleep. It is one of those nights where it will be very easy to fall asleep, it'll take mere seconds. Sleep comes on quickly, and you experience the mind drifting sensation as parts of your conscious mind shut down.

BAM. You're awake. Why are you awake? Because your arms are experiencing bursts of lancing pain, elbow to pinky. Whyy? You were so completely comfortable and you didn't move an inch. You're still dead tired, but now you gotta deal with this and reposition your body to ease the symptoms somehow.

This happened to me many times. I tell it as a way to illustrate how deeply the pain is learned. It's not a series of conscious, anxious thoughts that led to my pain. Rather, some deep nervous system signal was sent despite me feeling completely at ease and desiring nothing but to sleep.

I'm of the firm opinion that in these moments, I wasn't experiencing any pain related to a structural problem. Instead, perhaps some dream thought formulated that triggered my nervous system into thinking: DANGER. And then the pain comes, because the "fire together, wire together" process has connected emotional distress to physical pain.

So rather than it being a conscious-mind controlled thing, it is this deep part of you capable of turning on the pain. It's wild. As wild as it is to fully realize that, it's equally wild to experience how very real methods can be employed to unlearn these connections. You can unlearn the pain that has been connected to your emotions. It still astounds me in how visceral and real it is. In my experience, it sometimes feels like my nervous system is this independent entity that runs inside of me. I can do very specific things for it such as going through certain physical actions or mental exercises and somehow these exercises will reconfigure this magical entity inside of me to work better. And it does work better - reliably, consistently, and demonstrably so. The changes are so tangible, they are impossible to ignore. It's like having a broken limb for your whole life and not realizing until its finally healed. The difference to me is night and day.

So I really recommend being kind to your nervous system and taking care of it. And how should you do that you ask?

Journalspeak + Meditation

Nicole Sachs describes in her book the process of journalspeak, and I really recommend using that as a source. I expect that if you've read this far, you may be generally interested in trying this out. There will be a temptation to take my description of the method of journalspeak and just go for it. The problem is, the prework is really necessary. Nicole spends the first many chapters of the book preparing you in so many ways so that you are correctly primed. So that you actually believe that the process will help. She does an amazing job of convincing even the most skeptical that this process can work; it worked on me! So know that what I say here is the tip of the iceberg basically.

The goal is to, every day, journal for 20 minutes in a very particular way, followed by meditating for 10 minutes in any way you like. The journaling should be done in a completely safe space where you feel free to feel. You can write or do speech to text like I do. When you start out, you want to do the prework of creating lists that can help guide your journaling topics. After you get some fluency in journalspeak, it can be more stream of consciousness.

You write for 20 minutes exactly how you feel about whatever thing. You don't hold back.

"I'm so fucking tired of being alive. Every day is the fucking same thing. Can it fucking end already?"

Cursing? Great, as long as it feels like you. You CANNOT modify your thoughts to be politically correct, or pull any punches. You're getting all the rage, shame, grief, despair, etc out. It hasn't had a voice until now, and the whole exercise is to get it out. This will drain that emotional reservoir. You'll write things that feel good to write, but aren't true. You'll end up saying something that feels wayyy too harsh but you realize it's how you really felt. Whether it's true or not doesn't always matter, but how true it FEELS does matter. It's common to start out strong and then devolve into half truths and say things that you don't really feel, but feel like you SHOULD feel.

It's easy to just waste time not being honest with yourself. But the spirit of the exercise is to finally be real and say the thing that felt too unforgivable or too terrifying to say or think until now. Air those negative emotions, and teach your nervous system that in fact, the terror, despair, etc associated with certain thoughts doesn't have to exist. You can think of those things, experience the negative emotions they bring on, and when those emotions pass, those subjects that haunted you internally for so long aren't nearly as scary as they once were. Shining a light on those shadows can dissipate them for good, but it might take lots of journalspeak to get there depending on the topic.

Here's an important part: after 20 minutes, you destroy the entry. It was never meant for future you or anyone else to read. By some stroke of luck, it turns out that getting these things out once, in any manner, even if you're not communicating those things to another human, is sufficient for retraining your nervous system. You're finding those parts of your thoughts and mind that are the scariest, most trauma-ridden, most rage-filled corners and shining a light for a brief moment, and then walking away.

Naturally, you'll calm down and some really big revelations may present themselves. Or not. In the end, it's primarily a nervous system retraining exercise in which you surface all of those buried feelings and empty that reservoir.

After all that, you may not be ready to say, jump into a work call. That's why there's 10 minutes of meditaiton: it's really useful as a way of calming down. I believe that the meditation is doing other good things for you too, which is something most doctors probably agree with these days. Nicole Sachs recommeds doing recurring loving-kindness meditation exercies, but she also says it doesn't matter. Just breath in 5 seconds, out 5 seconds and try to focus on your breath. Or do a guided meditation. Anything works. You'll feel better afterwards.

So that's it - 30 minutes a day, and you can heal your chronic pain and perhaps substantially change your perspective on many things about your life for the better. You can make alarming or heartwarming discoveries about yourself and your relationships. You can literally heal and cure those physical symptoms that have so long ailed you. It's astounding to me that it works. And it really does. My body is the proof!

In Conclusion

It was my neurologist, a very mainstream, respected doctor in San Francisco, Dr. Liberty Jenkins, who recommended this book to me. I think that western medicine is catching up to the power of this kind of mind-body work, and it's about time.

It was immediately that I started feeling better. The pain was 50% better within a week, and then it got to maybe 80% several weeks later. It's hard to say because healing is so nonlinear. 3 months later, I'd say I'm 95% better. Whereas it hurt to type, stand, walk, sit, and simply exist before, I can climb, run, and wiggle my arms rhythmically if I feel like it. That transformation over such a short time period and deeply connecting with how my body and mind function all amounted to a spiritual experience as well, but that's a different blog post!

I'm still figuring it all out, really, but I'm finally listening and understanding what my body needs, and I've never felt better about my life.

I still have lingering symptoms: my arms go numb when holding on to something that vibrates like an electric razor or a blender. If I get anxious my arms go numb. That's pretty crazy right? But it's so real. I didn't feel numbness for a month until the hours before my best man's speech at my brothers wedding. An hour after the speech, and my arms were back to normal.

For the reason of vibration -> numbness though, I'm convinced I did have some amount of structural issues with my nerves. But certainly by April 2025 when I discovered mind-body medicine, my condition was mostly an emotional and neuroplastic one. After just 3 months and so much positive change, I have no doubt that I'll continue to unlearn those neuroplastic things that can be unlearned, and the rest I'll happily deal with.

If you helped me during my years of extreme disability, I'm more grateful than I can ever express. Given how desperately low the lows got, you may just have saved my life by being that compassionate support network I needed. There's too many people to thank, but if you ever visited me, acted as my arms, or simply offered sympathy, you are part of that critical support network and I am thanking YOU!

And finally thanks for reading my rambling saga. Now go forth, be kind to your nervous system, and talk about these ideas with those you know. Let's make this stuff common knowledge to prevent needless suffering!