In high school, the aches and pains in Emily Noyer’s hips left her limping after lacrosse tournaments.
Noyer’s doctor diagnosed her with osteoarthritis and explained that the balls of her femurs were too big for her hip sockets, and the mismatch had worn down the cartilage between them to nothing. The normal wear from everyday life would now be bone-on-bone.
However, it wasn’t osteoarthritis that stopped her from going straight to college. Her mother had struggled quietly with schizophrenia for years. It led to her marriage ending, but she continued working full-time as a quality engineer until her condition worsened and she had to quit.
The pain in Noyer’s hips disappeared into the background. She took care of her mother and brother while waiting tables at a restaurant, where she ended her shifts limping from table to table taking orders and clearing plates.
“It was so much a part of my daily being that I almost didn't think about it too much,” said Noyer.
Noyer knows better than most people how our personalities and the people around us affect our chances of recovery when illness or injury turn life upside down. Now a Ph.D. student in psychology at UC Davis, Noyer is testing how both factors affect our chances of getting better or worse across a lifetime.
Personality, social support and a chance for recovery
Any incapacity — physical or mental — can make it harder to meet even basic needs and leaving them worse off in the long run. But not everyone ends up worse off.
Noyer is testing the idea that people’s scores on the Big Five Personality Inventory, which measures key facets of our personalities, might affect how they move through physical limitations, such as having a hard time walking across a room, to either death or recovery.
“We know that physical functioning limitations are dynamic,” said Noyer. “People can recover or progress to more severe states, but there hasn’t been like a method to really capture risk of both progression and recovery well.”
Noyer is testing her ideas with an approach her Ph.D. advisor Tomiko Yoneda used to learn how personality traits affect cognitive decline, such as memory problems or dementia. Instead of cognitive decline, Noyer is connecting personality traits and social support to health and incapacity with statistical models she has built with data from 16,000 participants.
Finding a path to research in psychology
Noyer had always been driven in school, just like her mother, Veronica Navarro, who had studied to become an engineer in Peru then came to the U.S. in the 1980s to pursue a graduate degree in business. Navarro’s father had been a mechanical and electrical engineer.
“He was very hard working,” said Navarro. “He was always reading and writing, so he taught me college was very important, but I really enjoyed the process going to college and everything you learn, all the books you read, so I told Emily about it.”
As soon as Navarro began taking medications that would help her return to full-time work as an engineer, Noyer enrolled at the local community college in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There, she made progress without needing to get everything right on the first try. She fell in love with research when presenting a poster of results from a biology project to her class.
She transferred to the University of Michigan, one of the top public universities in the country. There, she began to wonder what makes someone more or less likely to recovery from the kinds of challenges both she and her mother had.
But the pain kept getting worse. Simple chores around the house had become a problem. She couldn’t bend down to clean the floor or take dishes out of the dishwasher. Sometimes in the middle of the night the frayed cartilage in her hip would catch and she would wake up in pain.
As soon as Noyer graduated from the University of Michigan, she had her first hip replacement surgery. She had her second hip replaced a year later. While recovering, she stayed with the aunt and uncle who had been by her side through everything. She stayed with them until she left for California to start her Ph.D. at UC Davis.
“Reaching out to people can feel very vulnerable in these moments,” said Noyer, “but amassing social support and being social and wanting to have good relationships made all the difference in the world.”
Living life pain-free
Noyer’s research is still in progress, but so far she is finding that our personalities do make a difference in our health. People who are highly conscientious, making them more disciplined and focused on their goals, are more likely to make choices that help their recovery.
Navarro sees that kind of discipline and focus clearly in her daughter.
“She's very dedicated,” said Navarro, “very mature for her age, so that helped a lot. She’s always been watching over me and her brother and her dad. She's very motivated, too.”
Motivated far beyond work alone. Three months after her second hip replacement surgery, Noyer took up running. The first time out was hard, but she kept going. It felt good to be able to use her body that way again.
Since then, she has gone on backpacking trips to Point Reyes, Yosemite and Tahoe, both alone and with friends. A month ago, she ran a half-marathon and finished first in her age group.
“Running was something that I wasn't able to do,” she said. “It's this process, very much like research, where it takes a lot of discipline and time and commitment. I thought I’d try to apply these qualities to running and I just kind of fell in love with it.”
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