Community, Coping

Calming My Storm: Aanya Patel copes with migraine & TBI by starting a nonprofit

Aanya Patel was 13 when she fell on the stairs at her home and developed post-concussion syndrome. Nine months later, she was diagnosed with migraine. Now 16, Aanya is thriving as high school junior and an advocate for people recovering from traumatic brain injuries and who have migraine.

Calming My Storm, the unincorporated nonprofit that Aanya founded, is a big part of her advocacy work. The organization seeks to help people with concussions and migraine thrive by offering expert interviews and advice, educational resources, and personal stories of people recovering from concussions and/or living with migraine.

Getting to the “why” behind treatments

Calming My Storm is “built around the idea that if you understand your treatments, then you’ll be more inclined to do it,” Aanya said. She has firsthand experience with this. “Throughout my treatments, I wouldn’t really embrace them until I started asking questions until I understood how it worked. I distinctly remember sitting in PT, and being like, I don’t want to do this anymore. But I would start asking, Well, why do you want me to do this? Why do you want me to stand on my leg? Why do you want me to do this or that? And then my PT was super nice. And she’d explain it.” And that was enough to convince Aanya of the value of physical therapy and want to know more about the “why” behind all of her treatments.

A drive to learn more

When she found some relief with a neuromodulation device, she was even more curious about the why. She began interviewing experts at companies that make neuromodulation devices and asking them about efficacy studies and the mechanisms of action. She took the information from these interviews and turned them into blog posts, which was the start of Calming My Storm.

Empathy and understanding

What started as a blog has evolved into an unincorporated non-profit with a team of volunteers of a variety of ages and backgrounds. All the work at Calming My Storm is grounded in empathy and understanding.

“If you have understanding, you’re more empathetic. If you’re more empathetic, you can help people,” Aanya said. “And if you understand what’s happening inside of your body, then you can embrace your therapies and your treatments better, because you just have that understanding of what’s going on inside your brain.”

Expert interviews

The volunteers at Calming My Storm use empathy to increase understanding by interviewing experts about their research. The goal is to make research more accessible to the average person. Women with TBI is a particular interest.

Learning from others with the condition

TBI Roundtable is a new podcast from Calming My Storm. It’s a place for people with concussions and TBI to “talk about their experience in an open and honest way.” Each episodes delves into a specific topic, like living with a TBI as a high school student. In addition to sharing their experiences, guests also talk about specific strategies they’ve found to cope with their condition.

People who have had TBIs can also learn from each other in Letters to My Old Brain. Aanya describes this project:

“When you suffer from a TBI, you don’t know you’re gonna suffer from a TBI. You don’t know your life will be totally changed. And so a lot of people will describe this as their pre-injury self and their post-injury self, they have their old and they have their new normal…. In that moment, their hobbies changed, a lot of things in their lives changed. The idea is, you wrote a letter to your previous self.… It’s almost cathartic. Like, they get to really process what happened to them. And for people who read it, they can be like, ‘Wow, I’m not really alone.’”

Learn more about Aanya

Interviewing Aanya was a pleasure. I was struck by her wisdom, compassion, and ambition. To learn more her injury and diagnosis, what it’s like to navigate high school with post-concussion syndrome and migraine, and her advice for living well with these conditions, you can read my story about her on Migraine.com in Aanya Patel’s Experience With Post-Concussion Syndrome and Migraine.

Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash 

Community, Society

What to Expect at Headache on the Hill

If you’ve never attended Headache on the Hill, your first time can be a little intimidating. Knowing what to expect goes a long way toward reducing nervousness. Here’s what my in-person experience was like last year. Since this year will be virtual, I spoke with Katie MacDonald from the Alliance for Headache Disorders Advocacy about the differences, which I’ve noted throughout the post.

The “Ask”

The HOH leadership works ahead of time to determine what “asks” are likely to be most effective. Last year, we asked for legislators to sign onto a bill supporting funding for additional funding in training providers for the specialities of pain management and more fellowships in headache medicine. We will have different asks this year.

Pre-Event Training

Note: All training in 2021 will be virtual, of course. Some sessions will be recorded so you can watch on your own schedule, others will be live sessions so people can ask questions in real-time and work together. If you have been accepted to participate in HOH, you should have received an email with the training details.

At a webinar a week or two before we flew to Washington DC, the HOH team told us about the asks, shared background research, and gave pointers on telling our own story. Then we were told to think about our story that we’d share with legislators. (Your story should be about a minute that explains why you care about advocating for headache disorders. It doesn’t have to be perfected ahead of time, but is good to think about.) This will all be covered in the virtual training this year. 

Training Day

The first day of the event last year was a training where we learned about how to make effective “asks” and practiced telling our story in small groups. This will be on either March 17 or March 20 this year. Attendees were grouped by state. Because Arizona was a large group with seasoned HOH attendees, we also had the lone person from Indiana with us. (He didn’t have to visit legislators offices on his own, an HOH volunteer worked with him, but our grouping was helpful for training.) We were given the names of the legislators we were to visit and the schedule. 

We decided as a team how we wanted to frame our ask and who would speak when. At least three of us spoke at every office we visited—no one had to carry the weight on their own. If the representative from your district is one of the people you’re scheduled with, then you’ll definitely be asked to tell your story. We all introduced ourselves at every office, though, usually to say our names, where we’re from, and our connection to HOH (I said I live with chronic migraine and work as a patient advocate).

This year, it’s recommended that you try to arrange to attend the live virtual training (on March 17 or 20) with the people from your state, if possible. That way, you can have the same benefit of coordinating and learning from the expertise of previous attendees. If you don’t know who is attending, you can ask in the HOH Facebook group. (Depending on your specific meetings and how many people attend from your state, groups may be smaller than every person from the state. Exact groups won’t be known until all the meetings are scheduled.)

Meetings With Legislators

The day of, we started early. I think the first meeting was 8 a.m. Eastern time and we had to meet even earlier to catch the bus to the Capitol and take photos. (This won’t be an issue for this year’s virtual meetings, as they will be scheduled to respect the time zone participants are in.) 

Then we went from one office to the next. We usually talked to the legislator’s chief of staff or their health legislative assistant. They were often young and almost all of them were kind and down-to-earth. And they were curious about our experiences and wanted to hear from us. It was comfortable and not intimidating. Most told us about someone they know with migraine, which was a great personal connection. I believe we may have even asked if they knew someone with migraine. Beforehand, we designated one person to tell their story and one person to take the lead on the ask. As the conversations went on, other people chimed in. It felt like natural conversation. 

Even if you don’t get to meet with the actual member of Congress, don’t feel like you’re being snubbed! The staffers we meet with are most knowledgeable on health-related topics and their opinions carry a lot of weight with their bosses. 

Post-Meeting Debriefing

After each meeting, we debriefed together and filled out a short form about who we met with and how they responded. We also had taken photos with each person we met with and shared those on social media. The post-meeting activity will be a little different this year, since it’s virtual, but the platform will still allow for it.

After All the Meetings

New this year will be a live virtual gathering after the event for everyone to share their experiences. This is a fun advantage to having a virtual HOH. After the in-person meetings, most people went back to their rooms and went to bed early. It is a long day with a lot of walking, especially for people with headache disorders. Having a chance to all connect afterward will be a great bonus.

Community

Headache on the Hill Walk, Run or Just Relax Event, June 28 to July 7

Join me in a fundraiser for Headache on the Hill scholarships for people who want to attend, but can’t cover the travel costs. This is a virtual event that you can walk or run for or just set aside time to do something relaxing. You can participate any day you’d like between June 28 and July 7.

I attended my first Headache on the Hill in February and it’s was an incredible experience. We visited the offices of senators and representatives to ask for an amendment to a bill in Congress. While this year’s efforts were derailed by the coronavirus, meeting with staffers to talk about migraine was itself an act of awareness-raising. I felt like I moved the needle toward better funding for migraine treatment. If you’re able to attend, I highly recommend it. Even if you’re not able to attend, please consider supporting the event virtually.

Here are the details: Headache on the Hill Walk, Run or Just Relax Event

Community, Patient Education, Resources, Treatment

Virtual RetreatMigraine This Weekend—Join Me!

Please join me this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, April 17-19, for the virtual RetreatMigraine experience—a series of information sessions on migraine that will stream on Facebook Live on the Coalition for Headache and Migraine Patient’s Facebook page. Here’s a schedule of the free events so you can watch live. I’ll be on a panel on Friday and will be leading a session on self-care on Saturday that I’m really excited about. I’d love for you to join me!

virtual RetreatMigraine schedule

If you’re not familiar, RetreatMigraine is an annual in-person retreat sponsored by CHAMP. The second annual retreat was scheduled for this weekend in California. When it had to be rescheduled, CHAMP decided to make some of the sessions virtual and open them up to anyone who was able to attend. It’s a great lineup of knowledgeable speakers, so I hope you’re able to watch some of the events.

Relevant links:

Community, Society

An Easy Way to Support Headache Disease Advocacy: Please Complete the CHAMP Survey

The headache disease community needs your help! To gather information to help improve patient access to treatments, advance research, and decrease stigma of headache diseases, the Coalition for Headache and Migraine Patients (CHAMP) is conducting a survey. I’m a CHAMP member and can tell you that the coalition is doing great work for people with headache diseases. We can be even more effective if we hear from more patients about their experiences.

In order to do this important work, we need to hear from more voices. This is where we’re asking for your help. You can:

  • Take the anonymous survey! If you live with headache, migraine or cluster disease, we want to hear your experience. The deadline is Sunday, Feb. 29.
  • Share this with anyone you know who lives with a headache disease

The survey is hugely important and takes about 15 minutes to complete thoughtfully. I promise your time will be well spent. At the end of the survey, you have the option to enter to win a $25 Amazon gift card.

Complete the CHAMP survey by clicking here!