Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
What are you going to do today?
On January 12, 1997, hardly anything happened.In 1997 I had just experienced the most boring birthday of my life. I tried to organize a party, but all of my friends...all of them...said they were too busy to celebrate. Even my parents and my family were blase'. I don't think I celebrated my birthday with anyone. I was bummed.
At that time of my life, things felt like they were not going as I had planned. Just a week before I had learned that the bookstore I worked for had decided to hire the other guy for the supervisor job. I was counting on that job to help make enough money to pay for tuition and expenses while I attended college. After they hired the other guy, I started to wonder if I should keep working with my current position, or if I should look for something else.
I wondered what to do with the rest of my life...and I had just turned 19. I thought I had a plan, in fact I had life all planned out. But somewhere, a little tiny part of me knew that all my plans were not working for me anymore.
I wanted a direction. I wanted to make sure my life had meaning.On January 13th, my life changed forever. Really. And this is the story of how the worst day of my life turned into the best day of my life.
Let me explain...It started as a dreary, cloudy and gray, ordinary January morning when around noon my friend Jen called to ask for a ride to work. I picked her up, we had lunch and then we were off to the mall where Jen worked.
At 3:14pm, as I was driving my car down the street I noticed Jen didn't have her seat belt on. I reminded her that she should wear her seat belt. She chided me, telling me that I sounded like a teacher, or a Mom. She clicked the seat belt into place. We both smiled at each other, then we both looked at the road ahead.
There was a car in my lane of traffic, speeding up towards us. There was nothing I could do but slam on the brakes as hard as I could.
At 3:15, all time stopped.I took a deep breath, and for just a moment, I think I felt a part of myself hover above me to avoid the impact.
C R A S H !
Metal collided with metal. Then poof! A huge cloud of
airbag dust filled the air.
They say that your life can flash before your eyes. On that day, my life flashed before my eyes. Not only the past, but the present, and the future.
And then, after the two cars stopped pounding into each other, I felt nothing. Nothing but fear and despair.
You see, my parents had always prided themselves on being "good drivers". They claimed to never have accidents, and never get tickets. They were "above" those other people who get in accidents. So imagine how I would feel, only with my license and my new car for six months, and my car is now totaled. Ruined. Beyond repair.
I freaked. Freaking is an understatement. I cried and wailed and was inconsolable. Jen was such a good friend that day and did what she could to try to make me feel better, but even she knew what wrath lay before me when my parents would find out.
A witness saw the whole thing from his driveway, and scolded the young high school driver who hit me. He told me that he would come to court if I needed a witness. I couldn't think about such things.
The police arrived, the tow truck came, and Jen called in sick to work that day. After not being able to get out of the car due to the car door being jammed, I breathed in a lot of that dust and proceeded to lose my voice from my hysterics, so talking was tough.
And for the next two weeks....I felt absolutely nothing. Sure, I went to the doctor on the day after, but I was in so much shock that I felt absolutely nothing. I was numb. Good, bad, happy, sad, angry, mad, elated, glad...nothing.
And then the pain began. I was working at B. Dalton when I started to feel again, and it hurt so bad I fell to my knees in the back of the store. I was confused, thinking perhaps I lifted too many boxes that day. And then, I realized...it was the accident.
And that is when my problem with my back began.
I scheduled an appointment with my family doctor, who recommended a specialist, who recommended physical therapy. And so I went to physical therapy three times a week for over a year.
I was desperate to feel better. My back hurt all the time. I did whatever I could to feel better - stretching, a new mattress, a new desk chair at home, whatever I could do. And my intuition told me to start swimming. Thanks to my new job at the YMCA I had a free membership, and I used it every single day, six days a week.
Physical therapy was torture. I ended up with a therapist named Bill, and I now look back and I want to step back in time and beat my past self up for sticking with such an a$hole. He was a few years from retirement, and he treated me like a bag of dirt. I now see that he would be extra tough on me, and then claim that I wasn't healing "properly". I thought this is what it took to get treatment, and no one else around me had ever been in an accident so I didn't know I could say "get lost, creep" and go find a new therapist.
It was a tough year.
I wore a back brace for a year and a half. I had multiple CAT scans, and an MRI...they could find nothing but "soft tissue damage". It has been 11 years to the day, and the soft tissue damage is still there, at the bottom of my spine.
I continued with physical therapy, but I never stopped swimming. I started off slow, but I eventually worked my way to swimming for 60 minutes straight. It was the only time in my day where I didn't feel pain. It was wonderful.
So I eventually went from a size 12 to a size 6 in one year. I lost the weight, I was muscular and I looked hot, but I still had an injured back.
I longed to be healthy. I longed to feel good all the time. Really good. Really, really good.
Within the first week that the pain started, I had a feeling that this wasn't going to go away immediately. And I felt a small voice inside tell me that I was going to learn something from the experience. It was at that moment that I made a declaration to what I now call the Universe:
"If I ever become truly healthy, I will share this information with the world. I promise I will do whatever I can to help others feel good. I want to make sure that my pain has not been wasted. I want to help someone, anyone to not feel the pain that I have felt. Help me help others.
Thank you."
OK I can't quote what I originally said, but that is basically it.
It was in 1997 that I started to read what I could about health. I started with back pain, but I started reading vegetarian books, thinking that I could improve on my already vegetarian diet. I was still in college, going to school part time due to my many doctor and physical therapy appointments taking up the equivalent of a part time job. I read whatever book happened to come within my reach. I read whenever I could, but I made sure that I kept working hard at school.
Did you know that my first major was to be an elementary school teacher? That was what I was reaching for in 1997...but after the accident it slowly dawned on me that my injury may not make that as easy as I had originally thought. Still, I kept going for it. I kept going for everything.
1998 came, one year later. The pain was the same, perhaps even worse than ever. Nothing was working. I was prescribed an electrical stimulation unit to electrocute my back muscles into submission. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't.
The final straw that pushed me away from the doctors when it came to my back was when all of the doctors didn't know what to do for me, so my one doctor recommended a "specialist".
And this specialist told me that the only solution was to try acupuncture. So I tried it, again, due to horrible practitioners, they totally gave me the worse acupuncture stories that I'll save for another time. Horrible.
Finally, this specialist said there was nothing more they could do for me, except for one more thing: they had found a new "technology" where a doctor inserts a giant needle into the muscle where there is pain, and inserts sugar water into the muscle. There is chances for scarring, but it is supposed to help.
It was the stupidest thing I have ever heard.I stopped all my back injury related appointments (but kept going to other stupid doctor appointments). My back hurt, but I would rather have a sugar-free back. I kept swimming, I kept stretching, I kept reading whatever various books I found (including a fascinating book on women's health and candida...) but I still was trying to finish a college degree. I had "real school" classes to attend and real college textbooks to read. Everyone said I needed a degree, or else I would be a waste to society, and I would let everyone down. So I continued to work so hard at everything I did.
No wonder my back hurt.It never dawned on me that my health was more important than college credits, but then again, everyone told me I just had to live with the pain. Just grin and bear it.
But I never gave up.Eventually I found raw food...for totally different reasons than the injury. By the time I found raw food my back and the "bumps" (aka soft tissue damage) had become a fact of life. I was used to the pain. And for years the pain has continued.
Even when Justin and I started eating raw food, nothing happened in terms of my back. Until within the last month...when I started to feel like my back was feeling better than ever.
I have chosen not to talk about my injury here on the blog for so long because I feel it is such a long story. It is something that has been a part of my life for many years...and I see myself as a healthy person.
I am healthy person who had some unfortunate circumstances. But I always was a healthy person.
I refused to think otherwise.Despite what happened to me, I never thought of myself as "injured". I just always called it "the car accident", or "my back". It wasn't until being on raw food for so long that I really started to peel back the layers and redefine what it means to have health.
11 years ago my life flashed before my eyes. I went through a decade of pain. Wow. Am I really writing this? I went through 10 years of pain? I guess I did. I went through it, but all of that is changing.
I won't lie - the soft tissue bumps are still there. There are two of them, but they have been feeling better lately. I am not quite sure what part of my daily raw food has been helping me feel better, but I believe it is a combination of things.
What is the point of this story? When I first found raw food in 2000, I thought it might be a connection to my promise I made to helping others. When Justin and I went on raw food together in 2004, I knew there was a connection. Now that we have the blog, and we continue to write about raw food, I know deep within my soul that this is the connection. This is the link.
And through raw food, I am slowly healing the wounds that began so many years ago.
Everyday, I am healing. And one day, the damage will disappear completely.
Please, don't worry about me. Thanks to raw food, exercize, and fantastic friends, I have been feeling great for the past year. Sure I have a few bad days here and there, but I know how to take care of myself now. That is why I have a gym membership, and I walk instead of all the raw foodies who run. That is why I love the hot tub at the gym, and nice long baths at home. And there is nothing I treasure more than a good massage.
Today I am celebrating my health. I am celebrating the gift that came in the form of a nasty car accident. I feel so much gratitude for the experience, and there is so much more to say on how that one moment changed my life forever.
Just know that today is the first day of the rest of your life. You don't need a car accident to make changes in your life. If you know that you need to start eating more raw food, then just start where you are. If you know it is time to start working out, go for it. Get a membership to a gym, or buy yourself a rebounder. Go for a walk in the snow. Just begin.
Don't let a car accident be the wake up call to the rest of your life.
Begin. Begin today. Begin right now.And I will continue to dedicate myself to helping you in any way that I can.
Yours truly, with love,~ HeidiP.S. And tomorrow, back to our regularly scheduled Raw Food Programming!
P.P.S. I am still looking for before and after pictures from this era. When I find some photos I promise to include them in this post!
photo credit:
clairity
I drink Swamp Water...well, not really...
