I’d like to share part of my healing journey, which has taken a lot of time and not been easy. There’s a lot to write about so I’m going to abbreviate but I want others to have hope they can change what seem like hopeless health situations. I also want to share my appreciation of where I am now, and you can’t really understand what that means without knowing what I’ve been through, which I’ve shared very little about over the years.

I’m going to go back five years to when I was rear-ended by the car behind me when I stopped to let a pedestrian cross at the crosswalk. Prior to that, I was healthy by every measure.

Immediately after that, I began having excruciating head pain that went on for six months until my primary care physician diagnosed me with post concussive syndrome, a mild traumatic brain injury, and referred to a neurologist. Because my body was locked in a cycle of intense pain with no relief, the neurologist recommended I take very strong pain medication to break the cycle but warned me if I looked up the medication I would find it had alarming side effects. That’s not my kind of solution, so I declined and asked if he had any other suggestions.

He responded that he’s seen acupuncture help. I ran with that suggestion, and right away the pain reduced. After one session I could bend down to pick something up from the floor without lightning bolts of pain exploding in my head. I saw benefits from the acupuncture sessions I had regularly for several months and then at the beginning of covid moved to a different part of the country so my sessions stopped.

At that point, the pain was no longer constant; I could get up or down without having to grab my head and squeeze it as hard as I could to counteract the pain. The improvement was amazing. As the pain receded, I began to be aware of other symptoms that I didn’t notice since the pain was so intense it had blocked everything else out. I was still left with intense headaches, nausea and a strong proclivity towards serious dehydration.

The dehydration happened a few times a week for nine months of the year; it was a relief that it was only once a week in the winter months. This went on for three years. I would do everything I could to avoid getting dehydrated – staying out of the sun, drinking lots of fluids beginning as soon as I woke up (I usually drank water with lemon and salt throughout the day), resting for hours daily. I was afraid to do anything to exert myself because I didn’t want to trigger the cycle. I could tell what made it worse (activity, travel, tiredness) but not how to keep it from happening.

It seemed hopeless because inevitably I would start to get headaches, which would intensify with horrendous nausea and only culminate when I would painfully throw up massive quantities until even the gastric juices in my stomach were gone. There was no way to stop the cycle once it began; it was such a horrible feeling every time knowing I had no way out except to wait for it to escalate until it was finally over. Then I spent most of the following day in bed recovering; if I was lucky I had a day in between of feeling somewhat normal before the cycle began.

After three years, I said to myself, I can’t live like this anymore. At 48, I was too young to be that limited. Mainstream medicine had no answer for me; I had been told this sometimes passes with time, but after three years, it was clear that wasn’t happening. There were no other answers. It took so much energy to manage the chronic unwellness; people didn’t see what I was going through because I didn’t talk much about it, and I also rested a lot before I had to go anywhere or do anything so I was able to function in public. I looked pretty normal but was always close to the edge of feeling horrible. Sometimes after a dehydration cycle completed I would rue how people who saw me a few hours before and would have assumed I was completely fine would be shocked if they saw how sick I was a short time later.

I remember one Shabbos afternoon talking to my son who was visiting. I made some comment about not having so much energy, and he said something like, “Come on, Mommy, you always have energy!” I thought he was making fun of me because I was so far from that and I asked him what in the world he was talking about. He said he everyone always told him “Your mother is Superwoman” and that’s how I’d always been. That’s when I realized how successful I had been in hiding how badly I was doing from my children who were married; my son had no idea that I was really struggling to cope with daily life. My children living at home did see how often I had headaches, how often I rested, how little I could do around the house, and they were amazingly helpful in picking up the slack left behind for all I couldn’t do.

My husband and I appreciate different topics and different writing styles, and he bought an excellent book titled Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, by Joe Dispenza. I picked it up several times but despite being interested in the topic, it didn’t resonate with me and I couldn’t get through it. But months later when I was at this juncture and I said, I can’t live like this anymore, I picked up this book and it opened to the section about healing serious health issues. He writes about the science of why and how a person can change his health dramatically through his thinking.

Suddenly the writing style didn’t seem dry and uninteresting. I determined that I was going to get better. To do it, I was going to train my brain to imagine a different possibility and I was going to live in the future image of being a healthy person at the same time I was experiencing my present symptoms. That was the idea, but I couldn’t understand how it was possible because my baseline was feeling rotten most of the time.

My entire identity had became a person who had gone through this accident and was living with the aftereffects. It seemed remote to imagine that I could have energy, feel well, exercise or stand in the sun for even a minute without fear of getting dehydrated. My limited physical capacity was who I had become.

And I had to completely let it go of all of it if I was going to heal.

I listened to the testimonies of others who had healed themselves from very serious ailments in this way; I had to fix it in my mind that it was completely doable and logical before I began. If they could do it for something much more serious, I could do it for a mild brain injury. After the accident I had tried positive thinking and meditations and affirmations but they had all fallen short – they helped me accept my limitations and view them as an opportunity to live more slowly, embrace intentionality and be able to be a basically positive person despite how I was feeling. But they didn’t help me move past the physical brain trauma.

I was finally ready to start and committed to use this process to heal. As soon as I put the youngest two boys on their school bus in the morning, I would lay down in a spot I loved on a sofa on our patio.

Then I would begin listening to a meditation; I used meditations by Joe Dispenza available free on Youtube. Part of the process was to clearly picture my present situation, and then to imagine how I wanted to be, and to internalize the feeling of the second image. I began in my mind to actively picture and feel that I was healthy.

After a week, something shifted and I started to do things that I couldn’t and wouldn’t do previously because it was outside of my capacity. At 8 am one summer morning, I started working in the garden, moving landscaping rocks around. I was perspiring when my husband came home a while later and I said to him jubilantly, “Look at me! Do you see something different?”

He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to notice. I exclaimed happily, “I’m sweating! I’ve been working outside!” Writing that makes me tear up, remembering how emotional that was for me. I hadn’t done that for three years. I was afraid to exert myself and definitely to sweat. Lifting heavy rocks? Working outside when the sun was up? Getting hot? Not a chance of any of those things happening. I couldn’t take the risk since experience had shown me that doing any of those things would trigger the dehydration cycle.

I continued living as if I didn’t experience any brain trauma, while hesitant to share anything about my process. I knew what I was experiencing was real but I didn’t want to share anything until a long time had gone by with no symptoms. There was a fear in the back of my mind that maybe the symptoms were waiting to cascade back into my life.

Months went by, and the symptoms didn’t return. While I occasionally get headaches and sometimes I feel nauseous, it’s been almost two years now that I haven’t experienced that dehydration cycle. While waiting until enough time had passed to share my experience with you, I got busy with other things and it seemed like old news to write about it when there were things that were current to write about.

This happened in the summer of 2022. My daughter got married in the winter of 2023, and two weeks before her wedding, we were approached about taking the twins. You can now understand why if I had been asked about this anytime in the prior three and a half year period that there was absolutely no possibility of taking on any extra responsibility. It took all my effort and a lot of help from my teen sons and husband to get basic things accomplished day to day.

When I was asked about the children, I was so thankful to have the physical recovery and capacity to seriously consider it. Hashem had helped me recover my health, and now I had the physical and emotional ability to help others. In May 2023, ten months after healing post concussive syndrome, the twins joined the family.

Avivah