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She’ll feel a tingling in her fingers after about five or 10 minutes. The sensation will make its way up her arms and to her face. It will make swallowing anything difficult. At its worst, Lancor will lose feeling on one side of her body. Since changes in barometric pressure can trigger an episode, the 18-year-old Hartford High senior can’t fully control the situation; with a weather report in hand, she can guess when an episode might come.
That’s what having a hemiplegic migraine is like. Her grandmother gets migraines, but not like these.
“I’m the special one in the family,” Lancor joked on Friday.
It isn’t the kind of special anyone chooses to have.
It’s better to be the kind of special Lancor has become.
Lancor long ago developed a work ethic that has helped her overcome her roadblocks. Perhaps that comes from being 4-foot-11 and 100 pounds, Hartford softball’s pocket-rocket shortstop. Perhaps it also comes from a desire to not be slowed down.
Lancor and her Hurricanes hit the road for a Vermont Division II tournament game at BFA-Fairfax this afternoon. If the Canes lose — and, as an No. 11 seed, they’re the underdog — it’ll mark the end of four years of sports for Lancor, who spent all of them on the softball and girls soccer varsity rosters.
A central defender, Lancor landed a spot on the Vermont Lions Cup team last fall. She was recently chosen to play in the Vermont Senior All-Star softball game later this summer. She’s also beaten back the challenges that come with migraines and unrelated hearing loss to make high honors at Hartford for 15 straight marking periods. Her latest award — membership on the all-Marble Valley League softball first team — arrived Sunday night.
The list grows from there.
“She’s a caring person,” Hartford softball coach Gary Gervais said. “She’s an ideal captain. She’s always concerned about the welfare of other players on the team. She has a motherly approach to younger players and guides them. She’s a good all-around person.”
Between her hearing issues and the migraines, Lancor has had a lot to battle.
The former first reared up when she was very young. Multiple earaches produced a diagnosis of holes in her eardrums, which she was told would heal over time. They never did; surgical tubes didn’t help, either, and Lancor had what she estimates now as 15 to 25 percent hearing loss by the time she reached middle school.
The migraines had begun by then as well.
“I was diagnosed the summer going into my sixth-grade year,” she recalled. “That summer, in July, I was at the softball field practicing and I noticed a numbness in my arm. My mom thought it was a muscle strain or something, so we went home after that. It started traveling up my body, and it was a full-on stroke and they had to call 911.”
Lancor spent the better part of a week in the hospital upon the first outbreak. It took “three or four neurologists” before her family learned she had a condition that — according information provided by her mother, Heather — affects all of three in 10,000 Americans.
Hemiplegic migraines present weakness or paralysis on one side of the body, can affect vision or speech and can produce other symptoms that resemble a stroke. According to The Migraine Trust, a British organization that studies the malady, the effects can last anywhere from an hour to several days but usually end within 24 hours.
It’s a frightening experience to those who first go through it.
“When I was in the hospital, I remember my mom sitting next to me, and obviously I was crying because I was nervous and none of us knew what was going on,” Lancor said. “I said, ‘Mom, if I have to stop sports, I’ll stop sports.’ At that point, we had no clue what was going on. …
“We didn’t know what was going on, and I still don’t know if something might go wrong further than what has gone wrong, so I just push myself to go as hard as I can go. With athletics, that’s a way out of thinking about the medical issues.”
Lancor knows a lot more about her migraines, and a lot more about herself, now that she’s about to head off to college.
She’d have three or four attacks a week when she was first diagnosed; taking a variety of precautions and having greater knowledge, she only goes through two to four episodes a year now. She takes blood thinners regularly. Some odors, such as perfumes or smoke, can be triggers, so she avoids them. Caffeine is a no-no.
“I can have chocolate,” she happily reported. “That’s the one thing I love to have, and I’m so glad.”
She’s attuned to the weather as well. If she knows the barometric pressure might drop, she’s prepared. Sometime down the road, she’ll have to choose a place to live, such as Florida or Arizona, where the barometer doesn’t fluctuate like it can in Vermont.
Long ago, Lancor dedicated herself to being the best she could be. Being the smallest person on the team motivated her, but so did the notion of beating back learning issues caused by her hearing loss or anything that might result from a migraine attack. She has persevered, and she has excelled.
Gervais recalled Lancor’s freshman year with Hartford softball. He initially placed her on the Canes’ junior varsity, but with a handful of varsity players absent the first three weeks of the campaign because of a trip to France, Gervais gave the newcomer a shot.
“She proved she belonged; she wrote her own story,” he said. “She performed very well those first three weeks of the season. I don’t think she ever played a JV game.”
Lancor enters the University of Connecticut this autumn with plans on studying chemical engineering and hoping to latch on to a club softball team. But first, she has a few other tasks to finish.
“When I was younger, I played in the goal for soccer and (people) were always like, ‘You’re too short, you’re never going to be able to get there,’ and I was able to jump and touch the crossbar,” Lancor said. “It was showing them that just because you’re small, it doesn’t mean anything.
“A lot of kids nowadays think I’m 10 times younger than I actually am because of my height. Then I go out there and prove myself on the field, and it’s like, ‘Yeah, I just did that.’ So it’s nice.”
Greg Fennell can be reached at gfennell@vnews.com or 603-727-3226.