Ellen and the Day the Headache Left

This happened not long after I took my very first class in Craniosacral Therapy.I was still new enough to the work that I carried both wonder and uncertainty in equal measure. I believed in what I had learned, but I hadn’t yet seen just how far the body—and the Spirit—might be willing to go.

Ellen came to me through what I’ve learned to recognize as one of God’s favorite methods of introduction: a chance meeting on a sidewalk.

Someone I already worked with ran into her on the street in the small town of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. It was one of those brief polite exchanges that might have gone nowhere—except Ellen looked like someone whose life had been emptied out.

She had once been vibrant. Golf. Swimming. Grandchildren. Motion. Laughter. A full calendar.

Now, over the course of two years, she had been reduced to a shadow of herself.

Her cervical spine had been the battleground. Thirteen surgeries in two years. Thirteen attempts to fix something that only seemed to worsen with every intervention. By the time she reached me, her neurosurgeon had reached the end of his road. He wanted to implant a morphine pump under her skin—an admission, whether spoken or not, that this would now be about management, not healing.

Her husband was exhausted. A good man. A hard worker. He was trying to hold a job, hold a household together, and hold his wife through pain he could not fix. Ellen was so restricted that she wasn’t allowed to lift more than five pounds. Five pounds. That meant she couldn’t even pick up her grandchildren. Her daughter had been forced to arrange daycare—not because Ellen didn’t love them, but because her body had been declared unsafe.

All of it weighed heavily on her—physically, emotionally, spiritually.

So when my client gave her my number, it wasn’t hope that brought her to my office.

It was desperation.

The First Visit

The first time Ellen came in, her husband had to carry her—bodily—up the five short steps to my door. Five steps that might as well have been a mountain.

They sat together on the couch in my office, close, weary, holding hands the way people do when they don’t know what comes next. We talked for a long time. About her history. The surgeries. The fear. The morphine pump. The life she felt slipping through her fingers.

And then, almost as an afterthought, she added one more thing.

She had been living with a migraine.

Not an occasional headache.

Not one that came and went.

A constant, unrelenting migraine that had been with her for six months. Day and night. No reprieve. No mercy.

I listened.

And then I said something that, in hindsight, still makes me smile.

“Well,” I said gently, “first things first. Let’s get rid of this headache.”

From the couch, her husband laughed out loud.

Not mockingly.

Not cruelly.

It was the laugh of a man who had run out of reasonable expectations.

The Table

Eventually, I persuaded Ellen to lie down—fully clothed, on top of the covers. There was nothing dramatic about it. No preparation, no ceremony. Her husband sat silently on the couch, watching. Waiting. Hoping without hope.

I placed my hands beneath her head, near the base of her skull.

And I prayed.

Not loudly. Not theatrically.Just quietly, honestly, with the kind of prayer that says, “God, if You want to do something here, You are welcome.”

About fifteen minutes in, I noticed tears slipping from the corners of her eyes.

Immediately, my heart broke open.

I assumed pain. I assumed disappointment. I assumed I had made things worse.

“Oh Ellen,” I said softly, “tell me what’s happening. I am so, so sorry for all that you’ve been through.”

She opened her eyes and looked up at me, puzzled.

“You don’t know?” she asked.

I assured her I did not.

She said something I will never forget.

“I’m not crying from pain,” she said.

“I’m crying because it’s gone.”

The migraine—the six-month, relentless, crushing pain—was gone.

She began to describe what she was experiencing.

With her eyes closed, she said it felt as though Jesus was standing at the side of the table, reaching His hand into her neck. She said He was rearranging everything—muscles, tendons, bones—methodically, intentionally, gently.

She wept.

Then she reached up, took my hand, and kissed it.

I was stunned.

And utterly grateful.

I knew—without a shadow of doubt—that whatever had just happened had very little to do with me.

The Weeks That Followed

I worked with Ellen weekly for four weeks.

Each time she arrived stronger. More upright. More present. More herself.

By the end of those four weeks, she was driving herself. Walking up the steps without assistance. Sitting, standing, moving with a confidence her body had not allowed in years.

She returned to her neurosurgeon for her next scheduled appointment.

She told me later that he cleared his entire schedule for her.

He spent hours with her, asking detailed questions: