Anna Canady

By Jenna MacFarlane

High school is hard. It’s especially hard when you’re dealing with unexplained illness, chronic pain, and fatigue. For Anna Canady, high school was characterized by all of these things — but also by the support, faith, and freedom she found at Lakeland Christian School. 

When Anna Canady began her freshman year at LCS, her body stopped working the way it used to. She suddenly developed tics — repetitive, uncontrollable muscle spasms — that grew worse as time went on. She began feeling fatigued all the time. Anna’s body was under stress, and no one knew why. 

Anna would embark on dozens of doctors’ visits and trips across the country to nail down the right diagnosis: Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is a disorder where collagen formation is defective in some way. Collagen is crucial to our strength and flexibility — so when something’s not right, it leads to nerve damage and a host of other complications.

As a result, she developed chronic regional pain syndrome (CRPS). At just 15 years old, her whole body burned with pain in a way unimaginable to those of us who have never experienced it. She ended up in a wheelchair, and on her way to the Cleveland Clinic in hopes of some relief. 

While Ehlers-Danlos isn’t treatable, CRPS can be managed with spinal cord stimulation — a treatment process that vibrates the spinal cord, distracts the nerves, and lessens the pain. At the Cleveland Clinic, Anna underwent six weeks of this treatment, spending half her time in the hospital and half her time outpatient at the Ronald McDonald house.

Relief from the treatment came slowly. Anna was still spending all day, every day, in bed, so she began knitting hats for the other kids in the Ronald McDonald house. Every time students and teachers at LCS would mail her a new batch of yarn, she got to work. “I needed to use my time for something meaningful,” she said. “Living like that doesn’t leave a lot of room for you to feel sorry for yourself. Everything just hurt. Making hats was a way to tell the other kids, ‘This is terrible, but we’re in it together.’”

And of course, through all this, Anna had to finish high school. LCS made her experience a whole lot easier — and a whole lot more fulfilling. LCS made it possible for Anna to study in a hybrid format. Her teachers helped her develop a class schedule that allowed her to get her credits while taking only three classes a day. When she had the energy, she could study in class, and stay home when she didn’t. 

Anna attributes a lot of her ability to heal to LCS. The school allowed her the flexibility she needed, and it gave her mom — a teacher at LCS — the time off she needed to travel with Anna to all of her appointments and treatments.

If there’s one thing that’s never changed about Anna, it’s her desire to prove herself, her conviction to let nothing stand in the way of her goals. Growing up, she’d dreamt of hiking, seeing the world, going out west and exploring. While her body won’t allow her to do this in the traditional way today, she made her own way: in her Hyundai Sonata.

In 2020, she took a solo road trip all the way out to California and back. She spent more than 6 months on the road, camping in her car, seeing everything she’d dreamt of seeing — mountain peaks, valleys, and canyons. “I just needed to prove to myself that I could do it,” she said. “And I did.”

High schoolers today are under a lot of stress and pressure to perform. We don’t give our teens much room to fail. In spite of their developing brains needing sleep, they’re on the bus in the wee hours of the morning heading off to first period; they stay at school after hours for band or sports practice; in the evenings they’re studying for AP exams and standardized tests; all while navigating the tumultuous waters of American adolescence. 

But at LCS, Anna’s classmates and teachers met her where she was. She was on the robotics team — a high point of her high school career — and she credits it to helping her succeed. “There were moments I wasn’t very helpful, but they were just happy for me to be there,” she said. “I could just be, I could just exist in whatever state I was in. I could fail and that would still be okay.” 

Anna recently graduated from USF with a degree in English Literature and is working in grant writing. While Ehlers-Danlos is something she’ll likely deal with her whole life, she’s learning new ways to manage it every day. She’s walking and able to lead a normal life — she just needs to rest a little more often than others.

When you go through something so life-altering, you can’t help but see things differently. Anna’s dream for the future is to get back out on the road in her Sonata and see the world. 

“If I could go back and do it again, I’m not sure I’d choose life without my illness — well, actually, I think I would,” she laughed. “It’s hard to say. All I know is that pain teaches us things. It teaches us empathy. It’s so fundamentally human.” 

LCS helped Anna strike a balance between embracing her humanity and finding the faith it takes to heal. “My faith reminds me that, even though the things we go through change us, they change us in ways we were meant to be changed.”