CINCINNATI — An unusual disorder left a former softball player with more than a dozen unexplained broken bones, but now she’s turned her pain into an app.

What You Need To Know

  • Former softball player Amelia Wares said, after playing the game for years, her bones suddenly started breaking without a cause

  • Her broken bones triggered an onset of other illnesses and chronic pain

  • She started developing an app that can help track chronic pain symptoms to help people get a diagnosis and treatment faster

Just thinking about softball makes Amelia Wares emotional.

“My passions were kind of taken away from me, not by my choice,” Wares said. 

She’d been playing all throughout high school and got a softball scholarship to play at MIT, her dream university, but that’s when she said something went wrong.

“I had broken three bones in my hand, and both bones in my leg, and I just had no idea, that was kind of my first sign that something was wrong,” she said. 

Her bones just started easily breaking without a cause, but she said the disorder she was later diagnosed with caused her health problems to get worse.

“I was passing out almost daily,” she said. “I had nausea, vomiting, I wasn’t able to keep food down. I was breaking out in hives every day, and I was also suffering from really bad chronic pain within my joints.”

Just like that, she said everything she knew was suddenly gone.

“I wasn’t able to do any sort of exercise, and I felt like I kind of lost part of who I was,” Wares said.

She didn’t give up. Instead of MIT, she went to UC. She’s now studying biomedical engineering. It was at the University of Cincinnati where she met Jason Heikenfeld.

“I know my own challenges with musculoskeletal issues, which are nothing near what Amelia has dealt with, but I knew immediately what she was talking about, so I was very excited to talk with her,” Heikenfeld said.

Heikenfeld is a professor at UC’s Innovation Hub, where he’s helping to foster an idea that could help.

“That was one of our first discussions is like, ‘What are you going to do?’ And that quickly led to start talking to a lot of people to figure out how they’re going to help you on this journey to solve this,” Heikenfeld said.

Wares is developing an app that can track chronic pain symptoms

“The one goal is to decrease diagnostic time because, for connective tissue disorders, the average diagnostic time is five years,” Wares said. “For me, from the onset of symptoms, it was eight years.”

She hopes to have it finished in the next two years so the next person won’t have to go through what she did.

“It’s really hard to live with, but from this I’ve been given this opportunity that I would’ve never had, I would have never thought to come up with this idea if I hadn’t lived it myself,” Wares said.