17 North Beach Street
Nantucket, MA 02554
(508) 228-1515
LONG ROAD BACK
Caren Öberg demonstrates the healing power of positivity.
For as long as Caren Öberg could remember, her life was defined by movement—big, bold, daring movement. She snowboarded off of cliffs into deep powder snow, paddled her surfboard into hurricane swells and climbed hair-raising peaks. “I didn’t have a lot of fear in me,” she says. “The bigger the better.” On Nantucket, she worked all day tending gardens, surfed in the afternoon, ran or rollerbladed in the evening and then danced into the early morning hours. A mother of two, Caren asked a lot of her body. She broke bones going off ski jumps, ragdolled in crashing waves, contorted herself in challenging yoga poses and pounded her joints running, jumping, leaping and living an extremely happy life.
That is the other defining element of Caren Öberg: her positivity. Perhaps even more than her F athleticism, she is known in the Nantucket community for her palpable optimism and warmth. It comes off her in waves, fueling her professionally and personally, and lifting up those around her. More recently, Caren’s positivity has served as her saving grace as she’s faced some of the greatest challenges of her life.
In 2019, Caren’s life came to a screeching halt. All the action had worn out the disks in her spine and they were pressing down on her nerves. Gripped by intense pain, she went to a Boston hospital where doctors told her she needed immediate surgery to fuse her spine. She underwent a laminectomy in which surgeons entered through her stomach and removed parts of her vertebrae and installed hardware. They then turned her over and entered through her back to fuse her spine.
After the surgery, Caren was optimistic. Her doctors told her she could start skateboarding shortly after the operation, so she did. They said she could surf six months later, so she did—paddling into hurricane swells that September. A year later, following her doctor’s orders, she was snowboarding again. But it all felt wildly different. The activities she loved required much more effort than before. Each movement was met with discomfort that gradually turned to pain. “I thought it would get better,” Caren says. “But the pain only got worse and I started to decline.”
One of her legs stopped working. Her posture began to slouch. The hardware keeping her spine together began to protrude under her skin, altering the curve of her spine in unnatural directions. When a friend, a former rock-climbing partner from Colorado, came to visit Caren on Nantucket, he was brought to tears by her deteriorated condition. Something wasn’t right, he said. She should go to the orthopedic experts at the Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colorado. Caren agreed.
When she walked into Steadman, what is widely considered the most advanced orthopedic hospital in the country, Caren was struck by all the jerseys and photos of professional athletes hanging on the walls alongside notes thanking the clinic for getting them back on the field. She felt like she was in good hands. The doctors X-rayed Caren’s back and were horrified by what they found. “The hardware was much too large for my body—two times bigger,” Caren says. “They said it was made for a linebacker, not my little body.” As a result of the oversized hardware, everything above and below Caren’s spine had been compacted. There was no more space between her vertebrae.
Caren was going to need another major surgery, what the doctors warned her was the most challenging procedure they offered at Steadman. Using a robotic arm, surgeons went in and removed the original hardware, which was complicated by the fact that it had fused with her bone, and then replaced it with smaller hardware. Three sections of her vertebrae were then fused, this time with a natural curve placed in her spine. The surgery was a success, but not without incident. The invasive procedure revealed underlying disease. Caren had dangerously low blood pressure, and she developed a blood clot in her lung. Doctors ultimately diagnosed her with vasovagal orthostatic hypotension.
Returning to Nantucket earlier this spring after five weeks in the hospital, Caren was rendered nearly immobile. Walking required canes or ski poles, but even then, she struggled with each step. She had already been forced to give up the majority of her gardening clients, but now she was physically incapable of working at all. Her daughter Emmae took over her remaining three accounts, while her mother and son served as her chief caregivers. A dear friend set up a GoFundMe page, which the Nantucket community instantly supported. Those funds serve as her lifeline today, but they are beginning to dwindle and will likely only support her through the end of July unless more people donate.
While trying to recuperate from her back surgery, the dangers of her blood pressure became acute. She had frequent fainting spells, sending her to four different hospitals. One of the falls resulted in cracking her head open. Due to the blood thinners she was taking, the wound gushed uncontrollably and she needed to have her scalp stapled shut at the emergency room. The pain was so excruciating that every discomfort before or since has paled in comparison.
And yet despite it all, Caren talks about her health saga without a hint of self-pity. With movement taken away from her, she is relying on her other superpower: positivity. Caren glows with an infectious appreciation for life, that, even now, despite withering pain and the loss of the activities she loves most, appears fully intact. “The world is even more beautiful than I thought because I can see it more clearly now…I’m not going so fast in it,” she says. “I’m slowing down to just watch nature. At this slower place, the world is more beautiful; it’s brighter.”
Indeed, Caren’s optimistic lens on life has only become more enhanced in the shadow of the enormous journey she’s been on. “Being in the hospital for five weeks after the surgery and not being able to get out of bed and not knowing if I was going to make it another day really has me so grateful to be alive,” she says. “To see my children’s faces. To see this beautiful island. The ocean. This community. Downtown. Everything is just so beautiful. I used to get up and just want to go, go, go all day long, but now I’m just grateful to be in my room and to hear my children’s voices.”
While her doctors cannot be sure what level of mobility she will ever regain, Caren is holding on to hope and her own capacity to heal. “I have this power within me,” she says. “When I used to surf, I used to paddle out in these huge hurricane swells and it was hard to get out, but I wouldn’t stop until I got out. So I’m using that same power now to get up the stairs, to get myself dressed, and to get myself out of bed in the morning so hopefully I can surf again someday.”
Click here to donate to Caren Öberg’s GoFundMe page, which is supporting her while she continues to heal and get back on her feet.
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