A Pain in the Tooth

Anxiety, Endurance, and the Weight We Carry

 

“As I grow older, well, that boat I’ll never sell.

It works better than the pills the doctor gave…”

Michael Shynes, To the River

 

 

Something a Little Different

 

This may seem like an odd story to tell within a travel blog or our #Hike4Birds journey on the Trans Canada Trail, but it belongs here. It belongs because long-distance walking does not exist in isolation from the rest of the world, and because the costs of sharing that journey - particularly online - are rarely visible.

There is a common assumption that hiking across a country while posting about it is a dream life, free from pressure or consequence. The reality, as with everything,  is more complicated. Every undertaking carries its own stresses, and some of the heaviest are the ones that remain largely unseen. 

 

Over the past several years, we have been hesitant to write about the toll that constant visibility, critique, and misunderstanding can take. But not speaking about something does not make it disappear.

 

The Weight Before the Trail

 

We don’t often talk about our lives before the trail. After years spent moving through landscapes, seasons, and tents, those earlier chapters can feel like they belong to different people. But they matter here.

 

Sean has always been busy - relentlessly so. Work, study, volunteering, photography. For a long time, I thought this was simply energy. It took years to understand that it was also avoidance.  As a child, he endured repeated surgeries and countless medical visits. In elementary school, he experienced a year of abuse that went ignored. A few years later, he was effectively discarded by his parents. In adulthood, the brutal and unfair loss of an academic career he had built toward for years removed what little sense of stability he trusted.

 

These experiences shaped him in quiet ways: he became more guarded, cautious, deeply skeptical of systems and deeply nervous of people. Walking, when it came, was not an escape so much as a way to exhaust the mind enough to make space for breathing.  The truth clearly, is that he is not good at confronting problems or dealing well with anxiety.

Choosing the world’s longest trail was, in part, an attempt by him to keep moving so the past could not catch up.

 

Connections in the Body

 

In late 2022 and throughout 2023, something began to unravel.

 

Sean started to feel “off.” Then came sharp pains in his side. Then blinding headaches that woke him screaming in the night. Neither of these issues might sound problematic with two exceptions.  The first being that he doesn’t generally get sick.  And the second being that on those rare occasions that he is sick he does not go to a doctor or hospital. 

 

Eventually, it seemed like he was getting worse and so we found ourselves repeatedly visiting emergency rooms and clinics. Expensive 3D scans and MRIs were run, and blood tests were taken, but no results arose.  CT scans. MRIs. Cancer screenings. Neurological checks. Colonoscopies. Everything came back inconclusive.

 

With no clear diagnosis, the tone in the medical community at the hospital shifted.

 

He was accused of attention-seeking. His pain was dismissed. He was told that he was wasting the doctor’s time and to go away.  Not because of behaviour, but because his symptoms did not fit a tidy explanation. Then, when he refused a dangerous cocktail of highly addictive muscle relaxants - something a local pharmacist strongly advised against - he was told at a local hospital that he was no longer welcome in Ontario’s healthcare system for “refusing treatment.”  After this, he was turned away from the emergency room.  

 

We were left on our own to figure out what was wrong.

 

A Pain in the Tooth

 

Then, a month later, as his side stopped hurting, his teeth began to throb.  At times, even breathing sent waves of pain through his jaw and skull. Assuming it was a cavity, we went to a dentist. The exam showed nothing wrong. In the weeks that followed, dental scans and additional checkups revealed nothing was amiss. 

 

Then, after another visit, a young dental hygienist sat down and asked an unexpected question:

“Have you had any other physical discomfort lately?”

 

Sean told him everything. Then the resident asked, gently, “Are you under a lot of stress?”

 

He explained that dentists were seeing a growing number of patients with extreme tooth sensitivity caused not by decay, but by anxiety. Headaches, gastrointestinal pain, jaw tension, phantom sensations - manifestations of an overwhelmed nervous system.

 

The conclusion was both unsettling and clarifying: the pain was real, but its source was not structural. It was cumulative.  Then, with great kindness, the dentist said, “Your mind is overloaded.  You are effectively punishing you. But don’t worry that also means this is something you can change.”

 

Not knowing who we were or how we lived, he added, almost sheepishly, that the best remedy he could suggest was time in nature.  “Have you ever thought of going on a hike?”

 

We laughed. Sean cried.  And I made plans to take us back out hiking.  Even if we couldn’t continue in 2023 along the Trans Canada Trail, there were other possibilities. 

 

Digital Realms and the Mental Health Crisis

 

It was an almost absurdly simple suggestion, yet it landed with uncomfortable clarity. In the digital realms we now inhabit, the mind is rarely allowed to rest. Social media, constant connectivity, and the expectation to be visible, responsive, and endlessly resilient create a low-grade pressure that rarely gives us space just to be. 

 

Even when the body is moving, the mind remains tethered to critique, comparison, and noise.  It absorbs opinions that were never asked for, judgments from those who don’t know us, and endless commentary.  We seem to live permanently in a state of flight or fight - which invariably takes its toll. The stress accumulates.  As a constant in our lives, it shapes how we sleep, how we think, and eventually the health of our bodies. 

 

Stepping away from the digital current is not about escape, it is about a return to living a healthy life.  It is about restoring perspective and allowing both our minds and bodies to recalibrate. 

 

Time in nature and walking, in that sense, become less activities and more necessary acts of self-care.

 

Walking on, Finding Peace

“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”
Eckhart Tolle 

The solution is therefore to hike.  Not because walking solves everything, but because it gives us space to listen. To heal. To step out of the noise and judgment long enough to remember who we are when no one is watching.

 

We know now that endurance is not just physical. It is emotional. And sometimes the body speaks when the mind has carried too much for too long.  So once again, we shoulder our packs and walk on - not to escape the world, but to find a way to remain whole within it.

 

See you on the trail.