6 months into a neck injury that nearly broke my spirit

Say "cervical radiculopathy" five times fast

I first noticed it in the middle of a 12-hour walk from one end of Barcelona to the other. It felt like a kink in my neck, which I attributed to the twin mattress at my Airbnb. I pushed through with minor restrictions—bending my head down to check my phone or looking both ways when I crossed the street. I figured it would work itself out in a few days.

It didn’t.

Over the next couple of months, the pain would subside but never go away entirely. I tried stretches I found on YouTube, heat, ice—all of which provided varying degrees of temporary relief. I needed to figure out a solution quickly too because a trip to Brazil I’d booked nearly a year earlier was fast approaching. It was scheduled for two and a half weeks, some of which would involve a lot of hiking. So I loaded up on muscle relaxers and hoped for the best, even though a little voice in the back of my head whispered to me, “This is gonna do your ass in.”

Surprisingly, I managed. The muscle relaxers (mostly) worked, and the trip was fabulous. I had my limitations—like not being able to dance the way I wanted to at a Carl Cox show in Rio or trudging through three successive days of 12-mile hikes in Chapada Diamantina National Park.

Then, on my return from Brazil—four business days before I was supposed to begin a monthslong contract with a recurring client—the project was canceled. Now without a job back home in New York during a bitterly cold winter and an equally frigid job market, I panicked. I started to spiral mentally, and my body quickly followed suit.

Within a week, the pain in my neck went from borderline tolerable to constant and excruciating. The tingling I’d felt in Brazil now extended all the way to my fingertips to the point of numbness. A continuous nervy ache shot from my shoulder through my tricep and down my forearm.

That first month was undoubtedly the most debilitating pain I’ve ever experienced. I couldn’t walk for more than a couple of minutes at a time. I could barely stand. I’d have to stop for a break on my way to the subway for physical therapy—which was the only place I was going during that period. Even when I managed to get myself upright, I’d hunch so severely that virtually my entire field of vision was the ground.

And that was just the daytime. Nighttime was worse.

A quiet terror would set in when the sun went down, because that meant I’d soon have to try to sleep. There were no comfortable positions. Lying flat, on my side, or on my stomach was impossible, so I’d prop myself up at an angle with a stack of pillows and eventually doze off. I’d have nightmares where my body was a monster attacking itself, and the pain would wake me back up. I’d look at the time to see I’d only slept a couple hours, then I’d get up and go lie on a heating pad on the couch until I usually cried myself back to sleep.

The fatigue and hopelessness perpetuated more fatigue and hopelessness. I started to worry that I would never recover—that this might be permanent.

A couple of weeks into the worst of it and desperate for help, I ordered a book that several members of my family swear by: Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by the late Dr. John Sarno. Sarno counts Howard Stern and Larry David among his evangelists. Don’t ask me why all these Jews love him—I truly have no idea. He wasn’t even Jewish.

The way his theory had been described to me was that back pain is “all in your head,” but after reading the book, I think that’s misleading. “All in your head” implies you’re imagining something. But what Sarno argues is that the pain you’re experiencing is very real—it’s just psychosomatic. Your mind assigns pain from unresolved stress, anxiety, or rage to the part of your body you can’t ignore: your spine. “Pain is your friend,” he says. “It’s telling you something.”

According to Sarno, there’s nothing you actually need to do to treat back or neck pain—not drugs or physical therapy, and certainly not surgery. Just the acknowledgment that it originates in the mind will begin to heal you. Reading his book was illuminating because it challenged me to investigate my relationship to pain more broadly.

Of course, what I was experiencing was an extreme example, but even with less severe injuries—or sometimes even small nicks or bruises or rashes—my mind has often worried that I’ll never recover, that I’ll be like this forever. This anxiety-driven anticipation of pain, Sarno argues, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where you become trapped in a pain-ridden cycle. And while this line of thinking is objectively unreasonable, through this process I learned how I started to think this way.

When I was about six years old, I felt a discomfort in my ear and told my mom it felt like a bee had stung me inside my ear. She didn’t see any swelling, but she did notice that my ear was bending in an abnormal direction, so she took me to the doctor. That doctor discovered I had what’s called a cholesteatoma—a non-cancerous skin growth—behind my left eardrum. I was checked into a hospital where I stayed for nearly a month and underwent two surgeries that left me with permanent hearing loss in my left ear. The surgeon told my parents that had I been born 50 years earlier, I’d be dead. The cholesteatoma would have kept growing and eventually caused brain failure.

Thirty years later (and with a lot of free time to reflect), I finally put it together: that formative experience likely shaped how I perceive—and preemptively fear—pain as an adult. Something that seemed harmless turned out to be life-altering, and I’ve carried that fear with me ever since. That realization brought tremendous relief. I knew there was nothing I could do to expedite my neck recovery, but to Sarno’s point, knowing I would recover was empowering.

And of course, I am recovering. Six months in, I can stand and walk indefinitely. I’m playing tennis again, jogging, working out. And that canceled job—the one that precipitated this whole mess—ended up starting back up, once I felt better, and with a longer contract than originally planned. I’m not back to 100% yet, and I don’t expect to be for a while—but I’m getting there.

Even though I fully bought what Sarno was selling and was starting to improve, I was still curious about what was physically going on in my body. So I met with a spine specialist, who ordered an MRI.

The specialist, my primary care physician, and my physical therapist all guessed I had what’s called cervical radiculopathy—when a herniated disc in your neck pinches a nerve and causes numbness and tingling down your arm. But you can’t know for sure until you look under the hood. When I got my image results back, it showed not one, not two, not three, but four herniated discs.

Pre-Sarno, I would have left that appointment in an emotional tailspin. Post-Sarno, I went for an ice cream.