Leavitt Area High School senior student athlete Taren McGray knew something was terribly wrong, but for a long time, doctors couldn’t tell her what it was.

She now knows she has Hashimoto’s disease and post-viral pain amplification syndrome, a reflex neurovascular dystrophy. Despite the pain, she remains a three-season varsity athlete, competing in soccer, Nordic skiing and track and field.

And, she excels.

On Saturday, she will join other Maine student athletes at the Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference track and field meet at Morse High School in Bath.

She is “very resilient,” said her mother, Mary Blaisdell.

“She complained to me some, but most people in school and around town didn’t even know anything was wrong, that she had anything at all,” Blaisdell said. “She’d go to school and she’d paste a smile on her face.”

McGray was finally diagnosed with RND in January 2010, after a trip to Boston Children’s Hospital. There, with a diagnosis in hand, McGray started to cry.

“She said, ‘Mom, I’m happy for me, but think of all the kids that don’t have something to look forward to,'” Blaisdell said. “She’s just so empathetic toward other people.”

The tears she shed had little to do with her own ailment.

“When I got the diagnosis, I was probably the happiest person in Boston that day,” McGray said. “I didn’t have to go on any extreme pills, or go through anything major.”

Leave it to McGray to minimize years of continuous pain helped only by physical activity, physical and massage therapy and a variety of asthma medications as “nothing major.”

Not feeling well

As a middle school athlete, McGray was one of the best. A star soccer player with great endurance, her best sport was skiing.

McGray won the middle school Nordic ski meet and as a freshman was set to become another in a long line of star Nordic skiers for the Hornets.

“She developed some allergies in the fall, pretty severe, after soccer season, so she started doing shots,” Blaisdell said.

“Then she got mono, and they kept saying, ‘Oh she doesn’t have mono,’ because the tests were coming out negative. Well, she had mono, and she had a quadrilateral sinus infection. They kept treating this infection with different rounds of antibiotics, but they weren’t really doing the trick.”

Following her bout with mono, McGray started to feel pain.

Everywhere.

“They thought, ‘Oh, it’s just part of the mono,'” Blaisdell said, “but by the fall it had spread through her whole body; she had pain on her skin, everything. And by the winter, she had developed a mental fog. She was talking to you, but she was having difficulty focusing. It would take her a half hour to read a paragraph, to write a sentence.”

Doctors diagnosed McGray in the fall of 2009 with hypothyroidism. In January 2010, after insisting on a trip to Boston, McGray and her family learned about pain amplification, about RND.

“They started her on a therapy of intense physical activity followed by massage to retrain the nerves,” Blaisdell said.

“It’s just amplification of the nerves, so, if I get really cold, I feel extra cold inside,” McGray said. “If I go up a hill, my quads are really burning, it feels even more so. Sometimes I’ll get, almost like tics, where it just shocks, like in my ankle or my quad, and it surprises me.”

Working her way back

The illness and subsequent break from athletics forced McGray to take a step back, to evaluate her life.

“Before all of this, I kind of defined myself by what I did,” McGray said.

“I was a soccer player, skier, I rode a lot, that’s who I was. But when I couldn’t do these things, I realized there was a lot more to me, that I wasn’t just the activities that I did, but the reasons that I did them were important.”

With a fresh perspective — as a sophomore in high school — McGray also learned that she still loved to compete, to push herself. So she started to work her way back.

“I just figured at that point, I couldn’t give up soccer for good, so I went down to the middle school and helped coach,” McGray said. “It was very much worth it.”

The winter of her diagnosis, unable to compete with her Nordic ski teammates, McGray accompanied them to the trails. There, she sat huddled in a sleeping bag to minimize the pain, and supported the squad.

In the spring of her sophomore season, she started hanging out at track and field practices again.

In addition to becoming more and more active — the prescribed therapy for her condition — McGray started seeing Steve Huber, a physical therapist, orthotist and kinesio taping specialist in Auburn.

“I started seeing her when it was still at a very acute stage,” Huber said.

“Then, the pain really was everywhere, from the tips of her fingers. We worked on the re-education of the nerve endings and the desensitization, and I’ve seen her progress from very simple exercise to much, much more.”

In addition to massage therapy and land-based physical therapy, Huber used water-based exercises in his clinic’s pool.

A certified kinesio taping instructor, Huber lectures nationally and internationally on taping techniques.

“We use cotton tape with an acrylic backing,” Huber said. “It decompresses the nerve endings and desensitizes them to reduce the pain. It’s based on which part of the body is proving to be a problem at any given time.”

In skiing, for example, Huber said, “it was more in the shoulders and in the quads.”

For track?

“The front of the leg, and particularly the push-off leg and down by her ankles,” he said.

“We use tape in conjunction with other kinds of treatment that really helps her out,” Huber said. “(McGray) makes my job very easy, because I don’t need to push her.”

With treatment, McGray returned to soccer. And to cross-country ski trails. And to the track.

Another wrinkle, and success

McGray’s impact was immediate. In her junior year, a fourth overall finish in the classical race and a fifth in freestyle helped the Hornets earn third place in the Class A Nordic skiing championships.

That spring, she was part of the Hornets’ 4×100-meter relay team at the Class B track and field championships.

“I kind of had to take it easy and really pace myself, which was hard,” McGray said.

As McGray continued to progress, though, she had problems breathing.

“She developed exercise-induced asthma, and she had it under control during the soccer season,” Blaisdell said. “She was able to use the rescue inhaler, and only just for games. It had to be really intense exercise.”

Then came winter, and racing in cold weather with the Nordic ski team.

“She wasn’t able to manage it only with the rescue inhaler,” Blaisdell said. “They gave her one medicine, which really gave her some bad side effects. She was getting bad nausea; she’d get sinus infections pretty bad. So she had a tough ski season.”

McGray often would finish a race, turn in her bib and head immediately to a restroom. She dealt with the nausea, and with amplified pain from the cold. But she persevered.

“Even when she was racing, I’d be standing with some of the boys and Taren would come around and they’d say, ‘She’s smiling; does that mean she’s happy?’ I said, ‘No, that means she’s either trying not to vomit or she’s trying really hard to breathe.'”

But then, she finishes the race.

“It’s like, ‘I can’t believe I just did that,'” McGray said. “Strangely enough, it feels good, because I know I just did it. I know it hurts a lot, but when I don’t feel like I can do anything else, I know it’s going to get better. It’s an accomplishment that I just did what I did.”

Her senior ski season bookended her ski career with another trophy. She and the Hornets won the Class A Nordic title by 60 points. McGray finished third in the classical race, and eighth in the freestyle competition.

“A few of us on the team who are close with Taren know that when it looks as though she’s smiling during a race, that means she’s in more pain than usual,” teammate and co-captain Lucy Knowlton said. “Even while giving this smile, Taren had superb technique. And even after throwing up after the state meets, she was still cheerful. She surpasses us all in pure guts.”

Springing forward

Armed with new medicine for her asthma, McGray attacked track and field season head-on.

“She’s had a really hard spring,” Blaisdell said. “She’ll be running, and all of a sudden she’ll look funny because it feels like her ankle broke, or something broke, but she’s really good at keeping going, which she needs to do for therapy. It’s a fine line between knowing when to stop and when to keep going, when it’s too much.”

“She knows her body well, and as a coach, that’s extremely helpful,” Leavitt track coach Heidi Richards said.

“She’s able to say to me, ‘Coach, today I’m just going to take it a little easier,’ or, ‘Today I’m not going to do as much speed.'”

McGray’s attitude, Richards said, is beyond impressive.

“She’s an amazing person to have on the team,” Richards said. “She has a great personality and she’s a very caring person. The part that’s crazy to me is that she’s never once complained. She’s still putting out amazing times and she lets me know where she’s at.”

Where McGray wants to go is to school — to study neuroscience. Even before her diagnosis, McGray knew she wanted to study in that field.

In the fall, she will attend St. Lawrence University in New York, where she’ll begin her studies. And participate in athletics.

“I’m going to do cross-country skiing, for sure, and I’ve thought about intramural soccer. I’m not sure,” McGray said. “But I’ll just have to see what I can do.”

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COMING SUNDAY: Leavitt Area High School’s Taren McGray and other high school athletes will compete in the Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference Track and Field Championships at Morse High School in Bath on Saturday starting at 9 a.m. See Sunday’s Sun Journal or www.sunjournal.com for coverage of this event.

Taren McGray of Leavitt competes at the Class A state nordic skiing champioships in February.

Taren McGray of Leavitt competes at the Class A state nordic skiing champioships in February.

Taren McGray of Leavitt competes at the Class A state nordic skiing champioships in February.

Taren McGray, back, of Leavitt competes at the Class A state nordic skiing champioships in February.