It’s been a long time since I talked about the car accidents I was in over the past 6 years.  I just realized the other day that I’m 2 1/2 years from the last one, and even though it wasn’t high speed, it changed everything in my life.  Just this past Friday, I spent time talking with one of my golf friends who has been through a lot injury wise and we discussed the mental side of pain.  It takes a while to recover physically, but letting go on the mental side takes much longer.  Funny that we were just talking about that because I work up this morning with a lovely reminder of it all.

Today is the first real flare up I have had in almost a year of the injuries from this most recent accident.  And honestly, it caught me incredibly off guard.  I spent most of the morning in denial hoping that it would just go away on it’s own, but as the day progressed, so did the pain.  Then I had to do inventory on what happened and why after all my hard work would this come back around.  The answer was simple, yesterday I had an incident on horseback where the neighbor boys shot a pellet gun near my horse and I as we walked around the property.  She jumped up and tried to take off which required some very fast reactions from me and my head snapped back.  My heart rate was probably close to 200 bpm after this and the rest of the day I was running on pure adrenalin.

Adrenalin is really good at masking pain, so it wasn’t until this morning that any pain showed up.  This is how a car accident works most times, many people will not experience pain until many days or even weeks later.  And once you’ve been in one, the body remembers so any type of physical reaction similar to that of the accident can cause a flare up.  That’s what happened to me today.

I wish more people would talk about this stuff.  Most of the time I feel like a big baby about what I’m going through and try to just pretend it doesn’t exist.  I was so fortunate in both my accidents that no real major injuries happened, but they did cause me neck and back pain as well as a huge change in how my body performs.  No one ever told me that this would come back to haunt me even if I just tripped over something.  It’s so frustrating!!  I’m doing my best to treat this like an opportunity to grow mentally and take a step back, but all I really want to do is cry or punch something, although I can’t really do that because my darn neck and shoulder hurt so much today!

Ok, enough of my pity party, there are far worse things going on in the world that the little bit of pain I’m experiencing today.

Thankfully I’m surrounded by a good support team who can be there for me during these times and help me recover.  Here’s hoping it’s a quick one so I can get back to the golf course!

-S