so this is another post from ye olde blogge… which i see no reason to write again :

.

(originally posted in 2006)

.

okay, y’all are asking about my accident. i was waiting until i scanned in some photos from just before i started pilates so you guys could see the difference but i can do that some other time. three people have asked me in the last maybe ten days which implies that it’s time.

this is actually a really long story and it starts somewhere around when i was in grade seven and came down with achilles tendonitis (achilles tendon, start at your heel, go up, feel that thick elastickey thing?) over the next ten years i layered on a pulled muscle in my sternum. mild tendonitis in my right shoulder (they called it tendonitis but i now know that they were not correct and that it was problems with pec major and minor, but whatev), a pile of knee problems they called condromalasia and wasn’t [the doctor, after a year of physio and ONE x-ray says to me ‘there’s no sign of condromalasia on the x-ray, let’s do exploratory surgery’ and i left of course], some trouble with a hip, i can’t remember which one but i think right, shin splints, uh…..

anyway you get the gist. lots of little niggles that got put back together with duct tape and bubble gum.

so then at seventeen i have a couple of car incidents that both involve pulling the muscles on the right side of my neck and thinking i’m fine after a few weeks of drugs that made my muscles melt like butter on a hot skillet.

please note the total lack of rehab except for on the knee and that was the wrong work for the issues in question anyway.

throw in piles of heavy metal concerts and then shortly thereafter i’m learning to jump a dirtbike. a dirtbike i jumped off of numerous times due to sucking at driving while doing tricks or racing along at 90k on trails i didn’t know well.

i’m supposed to be practising going ‘up and over slow’ to get the idea of how the bike will move and then i’ll add gas a little at a time. so yeah, i over pop the gas and wham! into the air i go!

no idea how to land of course, we hadn’t covered that yet.

and i land and my helmet cracks off the little metal rod that runs between the handlebars and my feet, right especially, slam into the footpegs.

do i land? fucking right.

does it hurt? d-uh.

so i think i broke my right ankle and drag my mom into taking me for an x-ray and they tell me that it isn’t broken and send me on my way. [interestingly i have since sprained my ankle badly enough to need another xray and bone scan – at that time i dislodged the chip i made this day and didn’t find at the time.]

cut to twelve years and two more instances of whiplash later (note we’re up to five or six depending if metallica concert incidents count or not… i say yes, my neck hurt for weeks) and tr (boyfriend at the time) and i are sitting at jane and bloor and chatting while we wait to turn right.

it’s snowing and the roads are slick and i’ve left a car length between me and the car i’m waiting for. that car is waiting it’s turn and tr and i are chatting it up and my head slams forward… and then i realise i got hit.

because we were chatting i barely had my foot on the brake so we bounced off the car in front of us. hard enough for him to look at me, look at his bumper and get in his car and leave. yeah are you getting this? i hardly got hit at all. [i drive a stick and that corner is flat, brakes weren’t really required, looking behind me was…]

tr was mildly achy for a day or two and then he was fine and i went and got some drugs and went home early that day. and i shrugged it off.

i’ve had whiplash a zillion times, i’ll be fine.

*laughs ass off*

what hubris.

about six weeks later the tip of my pinky finger on my right hand went numb. so i hit the doc after a couple of days (the emerg so i can get the x-ray fast *evil smile*) and he says that this kind of ‘nerve damage’ is ‘normal’ after whiplash incidents and to contact my family doctor.

WHAT THE FUCK???

NORMAL?

i haven’t felt the tip of my right pinky in three days and that’s NORMAL? you’re fucked in the head buddy!

so i find a family doctor and he prescribes me drugs and i try physio and it fails and at this point i bring in insurance and meet the hot doctor and try more physio and nothing. my physio keeps telling me i’m better but i’m just getting worse.

so i go back to the hot doctor (this is now late august and the accident was in january) and tell him i can’t walk and that the physio hurts and i feel like i’m getting worse. so he checks me with emg and stuff [stuck needles into my muscles and listened to them with radio and also stuck me with sparks to see if my nerves responded] and finds out that my nervous system and all that are working.

so i don’t have fibromyalgia hiding as an accident problem anyway.

and he looks at me and he shrugs and he says ‘i don’t know what to tell you, your options are pilates or pain management and the waiting list for pain management is nine or ten months so you may as well try pilates in the meantime.’

pilates, the thing uncle fester had been telling me about since BEFORE my accident. since after my accident. since whenever i complained about my back.

i, of course, knew better.

this is where the old cliche ‘it’s not the things that happen to you it’s your reaction to them’ starts to get really true.

so i call uncle fester and tell him this and manfully he doesn’t laugh at me and he directs me to a choice of two studios but really steers me in one direction. and that was to rr who fit me in immediately because i dropped uncle fester’s name.

you know the day i met her i weighed 65 pounds more than i do now (80 now)
the day i got in my accident i weighed what i weigh now nearly to the pound
that day i had skiied all weekend the previous two days
that day i was probably going climbing since i went three times a week
that day i was in love with and planning to move in with tr
that day that i was delighted to go to my work that i loved
when i met rr she described my muscles as dead and i hated my job and tr and i were already shattering under the strain [a LOT of other stuff happened in there that has nothing to do with my accident] and i hadn’t been climbing since the accident.

ten months. amazing.

four years later [nine now] and i’m still fixing this shit. currently the neck and the ankle from when i was seventeen… the things that are preventing the new damage from all the way healing.

life really is a circle.