ALLENDALE, Mich. — Imagine living with constant pain — pain that has no cure. This is life for 21-year-old Becca Boerma of Grand Rapids.
Boerma is turning her pain into purpose by creating a display of ceramic art pieces to represent the chronic pain she's lived with for years.
Boerma describes her pain by saying, “If you stub your toe, the pain is going to last for four minutes, if that," Boerma said. "If I stub my toe, it could last for four hours.”
During her sophomore year of high school, "... I started getting nosebleeds really bad; I was getting, like, 30 to 40 nosebleeds a day,” Boerma said.
With nosebleeds also came migraines that she still lives with today. “My whole life kind of shut down in an instant," Boerma said. "And we were trying to go to a bunch of specialists and everything to try to figure out what was going on, and we just had no idea what it was.”
Boerma found out she had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, making her much more susceptible to pain.
But after a pain rehabilitation program through Mary Free Bed, Boerma says she's getting her life back. “It’s gotten me an opportunity to not only feel like I am in control but to also know how to talk to people and explain to them what's going on,” Boerma said.
That's why she created a series of eight ceramic monsters, as Boerma calls them, that each represent a different location of the chronic pain in her body.
“This is my jaw, my hips, migraines, nose, ankles, knees, ears and hands,” Boerma said.
This one is of her nose. “I have a lot of chronic nosebleeds, so I wanted to have almost a river flowing across it,” Boerma said.
And this one is of her hands. “It looks like it should be a perfect box on the outside, but as soon as you break it open, you can see all of the spikes and the sharp pain that shoots out throughout every finger that I have," Boerma said.
Each of these pieces took Boerma 20 to 30 hours to make, but Boerma says it's worth it because whether or not she does ceramics, she still faces pain every day. So, she just wants to make something good come out of it.
“If this could bring someone out and be like, 'Hey, I go through something similar to that,' I think that would be great,” Boerma said.
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