The breakthrough in recovering from my injury came at the tail end of my reading project.

By a friend’s recommendation who experienced a similar injury, I read a book on chronic pain called the Mindbody Prescription by Dr. John Sarno, Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at NYU. In the book Dr. Sarno talks about how he believes that the body can distract the mind from tremendous amounts of stress by creating physical pain. He believes the initial reasons for many chronic injuries are merely triggers for the psychologically rooted aftermath.

Dr Sarno prescribes two treatments — journaling, and getting back to regular activity and working through the pain. At first I was skeptical and knew that the science behind this was shaky, but by this point I was getting desperate and was willing to give it a shot.

I started by writing in a journal every day. I began with “Today I feel…” and wrote about all the emotions and stress that I was feeling. I also went back to my childhood and wrote vivid recollections about the stressful moments that have happened in my life.

Immediately after journalling, I felt tremendous amounts of stress dissipate. There was even a physical response. My shoulders and back relaxed from being very tense. My body’s reaction surprised me. I didn’t realize that I carried such a huge burden.

At the same time, with great fear of injuring myself, I started typing again. I worked through the extreme pain that followed, telling myself that the pain was just my body trying to distract me from the real issue — the stress that I was neglecting.

On my first try I surprised myself and typed over 500 words. I felt lots of pain after typing and thought about quitting the program. I was afraid that I was re-injuring myself. I pushed through and decided to keep going. The next day I was able to type over 1000 words. The next, over 2000 words.

After one week of typing daily, I felt that around 80% of the constant pain in my arms and hands were gone. I no longer felt my body punishing me with extreme pain after a round of typing. At that moment, I remembered feeling a huge sense of relief and joy. I knew the treatment was working.

I kept this up for a few months. There were flare ups, relapses where I would feel pain like I did before I started the treatment. These would scare me and sometimes would make me feel like I was reinjuring myself all over again. But I had resolve. I read online sources and in Dr. Sarno’s book that relapses were part of the recovery. I was fully commited to the treatment. I pushed forward.

Eventually, I got to a point where I didn’t feel any pain on a day to day basis. Sometimes, when life got stressful and I wasn’t dealing with it well, a bit of the pain would come back. But I would fight back with journaling. Just being aware of the nature of the stress would make everything better — the pain would eventually go away. By this point, I knew that I recovered.

At first I felt tremendous joy every day about my regained ability. I felt relief that my livelihood was safe and I stopped worrying about the future. But life moves on. I got used to it very quickly, and settled into a normal routine soon after.