obtaining new levels of pain

I’m going to go ahead and label my really bad year as my beginning. It was the beginning of my new life of learning to triumph through pain and misery. The experiences that redefined who I was as a person, and enabled me to reconnect with my inner strength.

“New life, in place of old life!” Dimebag said it best, but I was scarred by my trials. I did gain new levels of confidence and power though!

Winter cycling was my mode of commute daily to college and work while I had some dull achy pain under my left shoulder blade… probably from practicing the drums too much (5-6 hours a day in between other artistic endeavors) with bad form… & I knew from my chiropractor at the time that somehow I needed to relax my right side to relieve my pain (the doorbell theory), but I wasn’t very good at it.

I didn’t get to college on time that morning, so my teacher shook her head no at me through the window of the classroom door. That fateful spring (melted snow & icy) day I biked home and noticed some boy who I perceived to be too young to be walking by himself, so I braked and when I came to a stop I went to dismount and slipped on the ice. I caught myself & my dull achy pain became sharp and very painful. I no longer cared about the boy! Screw that boy – he’s probably fine – but now I’m not! How dumb! I went home.

When I got home, I was sooo frustrated… I scrunched my shoulders up, my face; I heard a horrible crunch in my ear, my cervical spine, and my thoracic spine simultaneously. I couldn’t move. A friend drove me to the hospital and there I received a bottle of 600 mg of ibprofen which relieved none of my pain. An ems girl looked at me panicked and asked if I thought I needed a neck brace when I told her I couldn’t move it. I was so scared I said no… but in hindsight, I really should have said yes.

I went to see my Dr… And he laughed really hard when he read my chart. I asked what was so funny. He said it says I fell off my bike. That was the beginning of a turn to a very poor relationship with my Dr. where he constantly laughed at my pain and purposefully gave me the run around until I found the strength to seek out a new family physician… A whole other story for another day.

My mother had breast cancer at this time and so was taking T3s. I was desperate so I tried one and it worked really well. A few days later it wasn’t enough so I tried 2… I was in an ocean! I did not want to be in an ocean! There was no boat! No life jacket! Never again did I ever touch a T3.

A few months later, mid-summer, on my bike (on the sidewalk-tsk me). I was heading home from a friends, when a lady and I stopped simultaneously. I thought she stopped for me, so I went onward! and watched in disbelief as she slowly ran me over with her enormous truck while looking the opposite direction at traffic she was trying to merge with…. She didn’t see me until the front of her truck was over my bike and I was beside her drivers side door.

She rolled down her window and we had a short conversation before I went to gather my bike which hadn’t been run over by the tires yet because she was going so slow. She told me she was at a friends and they were just talking about running over cyclists… In hindsight…. I should have taken her info but I didn’t want to ruin that old ladies life… So, maybe she ended up hitting someone else and ruining her own life and other peoples. Or maybe she learned, I’ll never know..

Then, some other day that year I was trying to sleep but the bubblers in the fish tank room at my place were bubbling too loud for me that day so I went to close the door… forgetting that I keep my chin up bar there… oh wow did I cry like a 2 year old. It hit my head so hard I called a friend to come make sure I wasn’t concussed. I was working night at this time and was tired, so that sucked hard.

And that was 2011.

Thanks for coming with me on this journey through time!