Experience: "Why can't you just smile?": My experience getting chronic pain as a teenager

Ellen Leach developed chronic pain after a ski accident at 13 years old, causing her to miss years of school. Now at 26, she reflects on how it still challenges her today - and how it’s defined her outlook on life.

I was so excited for the trip. I was thirteen, and I’d never been to America or been skiing before.

I was on a ski lift with my best friend, and next thing I know I’ve fallen. My friend had lost her balance, gripping onto me, making me lose my balance. I fell down a few metres, directly on my back on the ice. My cousin, who was on the trip, came running over. She made a big song and dance of it. They quickly got the medical team, who decided they needed to get me to hospital, which was quite scary. They wanted to bring a helicopter, but they couldn’t do it in the weather, so they strapped me to a board that went onto someone’s back. Then they skied me down the mountain, wrapped in blankets. I remember thinking it was all a big fuss.

Hospital in America was very different to the UK. I wasn’t seen by anyone when we arrived, and instead was sent into tests straight away: blood tests, X-rays, and an MRI. Eventually, they told me that I had severely bruised my coccyx bone and lower back and had muscular damage.

I got back to the hotel, and I felt horrible, because I was stuck in another country. My parents and family weren’t with me. I was in a lot of pain, and I was embarrassed - it wasn’t exactly a cool injury.

The flight home was bad. I had to sit on this blow-up red doughnut cushion for the rest of the trip. I got a wheelchair through the airport and got to skip security, which was fun. We had this horrible science teacher on the trip who would give me my painkillers. When we arrived at Heathrow, I tried to walk and carry my things through the airport, but I was being slow, and I so vividly remember her shouting at me and saying I hadn’t hurt myself that badly.

After a week off school, everything went back to normal. But over the next couple of years, I would get a sore back and it would go into spasm quite randomly. One time, I was in a GCSE music lesson. We were playing the pan drums, so we were stood up for the whole lesson. I could feel that I was in more and more pain, to the point where it was excruciating. I told the teacher I had to sit down. But then I couldn’t stand up.

I was sent home, and that was the start of me not going to school for a long time. My back was locked into a constant spasm. There were days I couldn’t get out of bed. We couldn’t work out what was wrong, and this lasted for two years. Every time doctors thought it was something, they’d do a test, and then it wasn’t that. I was so scared, and I was miserable. It took a toll on my whole family. My little sister would ask me, “why can’t you just smile?”

I was fifteen, and I would be in bed all day, binge watching TV shows while my friends would be out having fun. They didn’t really get what I was going through – although neither did I. At that age, people lack the emotional intelligence to really understand what was going on.

After missing the entirety of year 10, I tried to go back to school in year 11, but it wasn’t working, and I was so far behind. They told me I should focus on getting better and come back to school a year or two behind, but I was adamant that I wanted to sit my GCSEs. They wanted me to only do the core subjects, but I really wanted to study history and philosophy. I sat eight GCSEs in the end and achieved As and A*s in all of them.

I was diagnosed with chronic pain right before I sat my exams.

I’m 26 years old now, and for half of my life I’ve lived with chronic pain. I’ve learnt that it’s all about pacing. Every day, I have to consider: if I do this, will I not be able to do this? How will this decision affect me? What do I need to do now so I definitely can do that later? It’s completely exhausting.

I’ve spent my whole life really pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I would do volunteering abroad, work multiple jobs. I’ve ran a half marathon and trained as a yoga teacher. I work as a police detective now, and it’s a challenging role with my condition.

I’m proud that my experience has given me a deep understanding and empathy that you never know what they are going through. It matters to me to be kind to people.

A lot of the time I wish I wasn’t in pain. But I also don’t wish this never happened to me, because it has defined my outlook on life and who I am.

Ellen Leach in conversation with Ruth Lucas.