Kennedy Griffin sits with her crutches, which she is unable to walk without, at the Medicine Hat Public Library.--News Photo Anna Smith
asmith@medicinehatnews.com
For Medicine Hat’s own Kennedy Griffin, one baseball game in 2019 was enough to change her life.
Griffin, 27, was born and raised in the city, only briefly leaving to pursue fashion design before her program closed down. She explained that she considered herself an active and fiercely independent person, who enjoyed a variety of sports and being outside in nature when she wasn’t working one of her two jobs.
However, an incident while attempting to steal a base during a pop fly would leave her unable to do most of the things she once enjoyed.
“I was running to second base on aa high pop-up and waited too long to slide, ended up with my toe into the base instead of my heel,” said Griffin. She continued on to explain that while most bases she’s experienced will move to some degree with a sliding player, these were pegged into the ground.
The incident left her with what she initially believed to be a simple ankle sprain, but after two weeks on crutches, she realized it was significantly more serious.
“So when I hit it, I did an anterior talofibular ligament tear, bone bruising of the tibiotalar joint and edema of the medial malleolus and peroneal nerve damage as well,” said Griffin. “The secondary problem that developed from this is complex regional pain syndrome, which is the part that’s affecting me currently.”
CRPS, said Griffin, is a condition that affects the nervous system, which can make it significantly more difficult to treat than something affecting the nerves directly.
“So when you get injured, there’s a process of pain, swelling, discoloration, that turns on in the body to make you stop using the injured area to allow it to heal,” said Griffin. “With CRPS, that process doesn’t shut back off afterwards. So it just continues to relay these signals that the part of the body is injured, though it’s technically healed. It just gets stuck in a loop, and they don’t actually understand why that occurs.”
It took six months to get her CRPS diagnosis, and unfortunately due to the timing of her injury, her physiotherapy was interrupted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Physiotherapy is one of the most important ways to treat CRPS, said Griffin, but it’s most effective shortly after the injury.
To this day, Griffin cannot walk without the use of crutches, which she has been using for five years in order to navigate. The condition has also come with spontaneous reactions to foods or other allergens, despite Griffin herself not having any lasting allergies.
Currently, she lives alone, and is reliant on her private disability insurance, as a side effect of her CRPS and chronic pain has been a significantly reduced stress threshold, where navigating strenuous activities can incapacitate her for days afterwards. Griffin says most of her days consist of walking around stores with her crutches to try and get some exercise in, as well as household chores and rest.
“People have been very generous to me with their time when they can,” said Griffin. “But I have a very small social circle and a lot of my support network has their own struggles at the moment.”
Griffin has found an opportunity in the Spero Clinic in Arkansas, which boasts an 84% rate of success without remission for five years after treatment. However, as it is private medicine, it requires significant investment that she is unable to save funds for, prompting her to begin to collect donations in hopes of finally getting the treatment she needs.
In the future, she aims to start an organization to spread awareness of what those experiencing disabling injury or illness may need to know, help navigate aid programs and fundraise for people who are experiencing CRPS and similar chronic pain conditions. She notes that as the ability to provide tax receipts may aid people like her who need to pay for cost-prohibitive and specialized treatment.
“This can happen to anyone,” said Griffin. “It can come as easy as a paper cut or, like, quickly twisting your ankle slightly for tweaking your wrist, usually in those extremities. And so few people know about it. I just think that being able to prepare people for it, and take that stress off them, is important.”
Griffin stressed that while she tries to remain cheerful despite her condition, she wants people to remember that they may not know everything about what someone is going through internally, or how much effort it is taking someone to complete a task, especially if they are disabled.
Griffin’s GoFundMe can be found at https://gofund.me/fc6bc5ce, and questions or donations can be sent directly to Crpsnerve@gmail.com.
