From Alzheimer's to Endometriosis: How Chronic Illness Shaped My Passion for Neuroscience

I did not become interested in neuroscience because of one amazing class or a perfectly planned career goal. I became interested in it because illness entered my family and changed the way I looked at health, the body, and the future.

My grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. My mom was going through treatment for breast cancer. At the same time, I was struggling with severe pain and symptoms that we eventually began to understand as endometriosis. For a while, it felt like everyone's body was doing something we could not control.

I had questions about all of it. Why does the brain lose memories? Why does one person develop a disease while another does not? Why can two people have the same condition but completely different symptoms? Why does chronic pain sometimes become so intense even when scans and tests do not seem to explain the full experience? Most of all, I wanted to know how much of our health we can actually influence.

Those questions are what led me to neuroscience.

Watching Alzheimer's change someone I loved

Alzheimer's disease is often described as memory loss, but when you watch someone you love live with it, you realize memory is only one part of what is changing. Memories shape identity. They hold relationships together. They help us understand where we are, who we know, and how our lives fit into a larger story.

As my grandfather's disease progressed, I became fascinated—and honestly terrified—by the idea that changes inside the brain could slowly affect so much of a person. The brain weighs only a few pounds, yet it contains our memories, language, personality, fears, relationships, and ability to recognize the people we love. I wanted to understand how something happening at the level of a protein, neuron, or signaling pathway could eventually reshape an entire life. Alzheimer's made neuroscience feel urgent to me. It was no longer just a chapter in a biology textbook. It was happening inside someone I loved.

My mom's cancer changed how I thought about health

Around the same time, my mom was going through treatment for breast cancer. Watching a parent face cancer changes the way you think about your own body. Health suddenly stops feeling guaranteed. You start noticing family history and wondering about genetics, hormones, inflammation, environmental exposures, and all the factors that might influence disease.

You also begin to understand that medicine is rarely simple. Treatments can save lives, but they can also be physically and emotionally exhausting. Doctors often have to make decisions based on probabilities rather than certainty. A treatment that works well for one person may not be right for another. There is so much science involved, but there is also so much uncertainty. That combination made me want to learn more.

That was one reason I became interested in strength training. When so much around me felt uncontrollable, lifting weights gave me something I could influence. I could become stronger. I could support my bones, muscles, metabolism, and mental health. I could learn about my body instead of only being afraid of what might happen to it. Exercise did not give me total control over disease—nothing can. But it gave me agency.

Then chronic illness became personal

It is one thing to study illness from the outside. It is another thing to wake up in a body that hurts. My experience with endometriosis changed my relationship with science because I was no longer only trying to understand what was happening to someone else. I was trying to understand myself.

The pain could be intense, exhausting, and difficult to explain. It did not always stay neatly limited to my period. It affected my energy, concentration, sleep, mood, exercise, school, and ability to plan my life. There were days when I looked completely fine but felt anything but fine. That invisibility can be one of the hardest parts of chronic illness. When people cannot see what is happening, you sometimes feel pressure to prove that it is real. You wonder whether you are overreacting. You question whether you should simply push through.

Endometriosis made me realize how much we still do not know. It also made me realize how long patients can live with symptoms before they receive clear answers.

The brain became the connection

At first, Alzheimer's, cancer, and endometriosis seemed like completely different conditions. The more I learned, however, the more connections I began to see. The nervous system interacts with the immune system. Hormones influence the brain. Inflammation can affect mood, fatigue, cognition, and pain. Sleep affects memory, immune function, and emotional regulation. Stress can change how the nervous system processes physical symptoms. Movement changes not only muscles, but also the brain.

The body is not a collection of separate departments. It is a communication network.

Neuroscience gave me a way to understand that network. It helped me see that the brain does not exist in isolation inside the skull. It is constantly receiving information from the organs, immune system, hormones, muscles, gut, and environment. Everything is in conversation.

Pain taught me that symptoms are complicated

Before living with chronic pain, I thought pain was a direct measurement of injury. More damage meant more pain, and less damage meant less pain. Pain neuroscience is much more complicated. Pain is a protective experience created by the brain after it evaluates information coming from the body along with stress, memories, expectations, sleep, emotions, and previous experiences. That does not mean pain is imaginary. It means pain is influenced by an entire nervous system, not just one injured location.

Endometriosis can cause real inflammation, lesions, scar tissue, and organ involvement. But those physical factors do not always explain why one person experiences mild symptoms while another experiences disabling pain. The brain and spinal cord can also become increasingly sensitive after receiving repeated danger signals—a process often called central sensitization. Learning this did not make me feel dismissed. It made me feel understood.

Neuroscience gave me a new kind of hope

When illness affected my family, I wanted certainty. I wanted someone to tell me exactly why these diseases happened and how to make sure nothing similar would ever happen again. Science cannot always give us that. There is no lifestyle that guarantees someone will never develop cancer. There is no perfect routine that completely prevents Alzheimer's. There is no single treatment that works for every person with endometriosis. At first, that uncertainty felt discouraging. Now I see it differently.

Neuroscience shows us that the brain and nervous system are adaptable—they change in response to movement, learning, sleep, relationships, stress, treatment, and experience. That ability is called neuroplasticity. It means our biology is not completely static. We can support our brains, build healthier habits, improve how we respond to stress, manage pain, ask better questions, and participate more fully in our own care.

Hope does not have to mean believing we can control everything. Sometimes hope means knowing there are still things we can do.

Why research matters to me

Living with chronic illness has also made me more critical of the health information I see online. Social media is full of people promising cures. Someone claims one food causes every disease. Someone else says a supplement can "reset" your hormones. When you are in pain or scared, those promises can be incredibly tempting. I understand why people want to believe them. But I have learned that good science is usually less dramatic. It asks careful questions. It studies large groups of people. It admits limitations. It changes when better evidence becomes available.

My experience with endometriosis made me especially interested in research involving adolescent health, chronic pain, hormones, and the nervous system. Young patients deserve to be studied. Women's pain deserves to be taken seriously. Conditions that affect millions of people should not remain medical mysteries simply because they are complicated or uncomfortable to discuss.

I want to help connect the pieces

I am interested in neurodegenerative disease because of my grandfather. I am interested in cancer prevention, health behavior, and genetics because of my mom. I am interested in pain, hormones, inflammation, and women's health because of my own experience. I am also interested in entrepreneurship because discoveries do not help people unless they leave the laboratory and become treatments, tools, education, or systems patients can actually access.

I want to understand the science, but I also want to help translate it. Patients should not need a medical degree to understand what is happening inside their own bodies. Young women should not have to spend years wondering whether their pain is normal. Families facing Alzheimer's should have better options than simply watching and waiting. Research should not stay trapped inside journals. It should change lives.

Illness changed me, but it did not only take from me

I would never say I am grateful that people I love became sick, and I would never pretend chronic pain is a gift. Illness has brought fear, frustration, grief, and uncertainty into my life. But it has also shaped what I care about. It taught me to ask questions and not to take health for granted. It taught me that strength is not the same as pretending everything is fine. It taught me how important it is to listen when someone says they are in pain.

It also showed me that science is not cold or impersonal. At its best, science is an act of compassion. It is the decision to look closely at suffering and say: we need to understand this better.

My biggest takeaway

Alzheimer's first made me wonder how the brain could lose so much. My mom's cancer made me wonder how disease begins and what we can do to protect our health. Endometriosis made me wonder why pain can become so powerful—and why girls so often have to fight to be believed. Neuroscience became the place where all of those questions met.

I still do not have all the answers. No one does. But I know what I want to keep asking: How can we protect the brain? How can we recognize illness earlier? How can we treat pain more effectively? How can we turn scientific discoveries into real help for real people? How can we make sure patients—especially young women—feel informed, respected, and believed?

Chronic illness shaped my passion for neuroscience because it made science personal. Behind every diagnosis is a person trying to understand what is happening to their body. Behind every research question is a family hoping for more time. Behind every discovery is the possibility that someone's future might look different.

That is the possibility I want to be part of.

— Rowan