M.L. Olmstead

I’ve been attracted to the art of the fight since I was a small child, probably 7 or 8, and I think a large part of that was my father. Some of my favorite memories with him were watching WrestleMania or any of the other pay-per-views of that time.

Eventually, I was exposed to martial arts, and then I was hooked. I grew up desperately wanting to participate in some form whether it be Tae Kwon Do or Karate, but there was a major problem. I couldn’t. For reasons I didn’t know at the time, my body just didn’t seem to move like other people’s. I was stiff and sore and would run out of energy so quickly, and I had bad Asthma and would get sick all the time. I saw so many doctors, but it really didn’t help. Eventually, I just accepted that I wasn’t like the other kids and stayed away. No sports, no clubs, just me alone with my thoughts.

And so it began, I filled notebook after notebook with my hopes, dreams, and fantasies of far away places. No matter what happened in my daily life, I could get away from it by creating my own characters and world where things were better, and I would eventually find friends that felt the same way. We could all hang out and enjoy the fantasy medium through anime.

Things were looking really positive for a little while, and then I received a concussion from an accidental kick. That concussion sent me down a path I would live for the next 16 years. The doctors did an MRI, and a diagnosis was given…Chiari Malformation, a condition where the cerebellum tonsils protrudes into the base of the skull taking away the space for the CSF fluid to flow freely which creates pressure in the neck, spine, and head. Likely I was born with it. When I was a child, the symptoms were there, but they were mild. Now as a teenager suffering from a head injury, things were going to get much worse.

First it was the headaches that would last for weeks, and no over the counter pain medicine would put a dent in the pain. It wasn’t a normal headache. It was a pressure that throbbed in the lower part of my skull. Then my neck started to become quite sore, and the list of things I used to be able to do started to dwindle. For instance, no more jumping. Every time I jumped, the pain would come back instantly. No running for the same reason. I was learning how to drive, but it was so hard to look over my shoulder when I was parallel parking. Eventually, I couldn’t hold too much weight in grocery bags because it would pull down on my head.

Surgery was an option, but at this point in time, it was quite experimental. Surgeons warned that sometimes patients came out worse than they were before, and there was no way to tell who that would happen to. So I had a choice, take the chance or find a way to live my life, and I chose to live my life in that pain.

For the next 16 years, I altered everything to the best of my ability. If I needed to run or jump, I would do so on my toes, making sure to minimize the impact as much as possible. I never parallel parked. I bought new pillows every 6 months because if they held my head properly, I could recover at night. And I made another decision, no matter how much pain I was in, I was going to get stronger. The stronger I was, the more I could protect my head.

In my early twenties, I decided that I would do martial arts, but I knew it couldn’t be in a real class. I was not going to be able to take too much of the exercise…no sit ups, no jumping jacks, wasn’t sure I could take the impact of the kicks even. So I asked a friend of mine if he could train me. He was a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and he was actually quite a good teacher. He brought in another friend, and we trained in all sorts of places, with him mindful of what I could and couldn’t do.

We trained in garages, college gyms, racket ball courts, wherever we could find a space that week. We even tried outside, which was very tricky. He actually hurt himself pretty bad one day when he slipped in the grass. This training was incredible for me because I could go at my pace and try to find ways to minimize the pain involved while actually learning the basics.

It certainly wasn’t pain free though. No exercise ever could be. I remember fighting through excruciating headaches for days after a session because I accidently landed full footed on the ground or I didn’t kick the target precisely enough and ended up twisting something in my neck. It sucked, but I learned to endure. Because the truth was, pain was an everyday part of my life, and I had no choice but to learn how to live with it. Otherwise, I would have no life. I needed to continue to get stronger no matter the cost.

These challenges only fueled my writing more because I had a need in my heart to express the journey. Whether we realize it or not, we are all fighting, we just might not have the glory and achievement of the characters in a storybook.

The training eventually had to end because of schedules. That good friend of mine went out to become a doctor, and I had to figure out my next steps. So I put martial arts aside and continued living. When I became a mother, the Chiari Malformation symptoms manifested to a point where I could not swallow properly anymore and almost passed out. With two babies at home, I decided to do the surgery, and I was terrified. I had a lot more to lose now with little ones depending on me, but I couldn’t risk something bad happening to me due to inaction either.

I still remember waking up from the surgery with a ton of pain in my skull from it being split and parts of it taken out, and I still felt the best I had ever felt in my life. I felt like I was breathing normally for the first time, and my head hurt but in a way that felt like it would heal. I never had that kind of hope before then.

From that point forward, all I did was heal. There was relief from the years of punishment that I believed would never end. And yes, I was able to finally join a karate class. If you want to know how that is going, keep reading. There will be plenty of cool posts on that to come.