I got knocked down, but I got up again...
*record scratch* You're probably wondering how I've winded up in this situation...
Back when I used to be a Parenting Blogger, there was something I didn’t really write about fully, for a variety of reasons. If I were to be using humor to mask still, which I’m meant to be trying not to do, I’d call it my Villain Origin Story. Back then, I couldn’t write about it for a long time because I was going through a legal process, and then, it was just my everyday. Ten years on though, I do feel like adding context to the backstory of how I am who I am now. If I were full on click-baiting Buzzfeed Style, it would be “The Day That Changed My Life”, which, I guess in a way it was.
In 2013, I was involved in a road traffic accident, where a car struck me while I was crossing the road on my way to work. I was half way through my pregnancy, having just received an (incorrect) sex-reveal of “You’re having a girl!” at a scan two days previously. (2013 wasn’t a great time for maternal health, anatomy scans were not a given in the hospital I was in to “low risk mothers” and the actual quote from the healthcare professional swishing her ultrasound over the cold jelly on my hardened tummy was “Well, I don’t see anything there, you’ve got a girl”. It took us ten more weeks, which involved several scans (related to blood pressure intake, rather than anything else) , and a 4D Scan where the nice lady put an arrow next to my son’s genitals on the scan to hammer home the fact that no, indeed, the hospital had just gotten it wrong. But I digress.) I don’t have a full, proper memory of the crash - I lost consciousness, having been hit side-on by a car running a red light, but outside of the memory of beeping and a flash of silver, all knowledge I have is filled in by the many reports I saw afterwards. The massive bruising on the back of my head and my inability to turn my head apparently came from it breaking a headlight on the car on my way down, and I, somehow despite there being no evidence of the car rolling onto me, there was what resembled a black tyre mark on my stomach. I had a cut on my hand which looked a lot worse than it was, and has left me with my only physical scar from the whole thing. I came around as ambulance personnel were loading me onto a backboard, where they asked me how far along I was (I was shocked to find out I was pregnant, until I looked down and remembered with an “Oh Shit, Yeah, I am”), and they gave me gas and air until I told the very lovely ambulance man that I was going to vomit on his shoes. It was at this point that the gas and air was taken away, alas. I asked the ambulance man to call my then-boyfriend. They asked me what day it was, and I couldn’t tell them, but I was able to tell them that the Toy Show had been on the night before. They asked me for my address and I gave them the address I grew up in and hadn’t lived in for five years. The only phone number I knew was my Dad’s, thanks to the childhood answering machine rattling it off in a way that I could recite verbatim. Again, I’m not sure breaking a headlight with your head, or leaving a dent in a door of a car, are good for your brain function, but it had been quite the morning.
In Cork, the maternity hospital and the general hospital are separate entities but attached, which is quite convenient in one way (there are corridors that connect them) but as I’ve discovered at other times, a recipe for mixed up communications when it comes to “who has what file”1. I arrived into A&E, with my full blue lights treatment, where they assessed me and considered me most likely to have a broken neck, which they could X-ray with the use of an lead blanket to protect my baby, who they’d found was still hanging in there on the doppler, checked my heart rate and blood pressure (sky high, as you’d imagine), and then once that was done (no broken neck - yay!), off to the Maternity Hospital to check on my baby. There he was, kicking around, happy out, oblivious to the terror his mother had of him having broken every bone in his little body. We were lucky. We are lucky. In a very medically-precise way, the midwife informed me that he was just at the right level of “squishy” that he was strong enough to survive (we hadn’t quite hit viability yet at 22 weeks), but still quite cushioned and flexible, as to not actually break any bones. I have no idea how medically accurate that was, but it worked as a reassurance. Two paracetamol later, six hours after arrival to the hospital, I was sent home with my partner, who was relieved to find after the most terrifying voicemail he’d ever received, from a Garda (assumedly given the number by the ambulance man), that neither I nor our infant were dead. I was heavily concussed2, in a lot of pain, with whiplash, unable to turn my head, but the baby was fine and therefore, home we trotted. (At this stage, also, big shout out to the individual makers of the screen of the iPhone 4 I had at the time. I was a banjaxed mess, it, having been in my pocket throughout this, scratch free.)
The next few weeks were a haze. I went to my GP on the Monday to beg for something stronger than the Panadol the hospital told me I could have, I’m not sure she expected “So, I got hit by a car on Saturday” on her list for that morning. She was able to give me something slightly stronger, while obviously pertaining to safety of the growing foetus3. I attempted to go to physio in an effort to force myself back to health quickly - the delusion was real, they told me to come nowhere near them until the swelling had gone way down (and by then, I couldn’t lie on my stomach). And I cried, a lot, over the fact that my Nespresso machine, which I’d ordered on Amazon’s Black Friday deal, was being held in a post sorting centre and they wouldn’t redeliver it to my house. (I’ve a feeling some of the tears may have been about everything else, but An Post got the brunt of it.)
I spent five years in litigation with the driver of the car who hit me, who insisted that I jumped out in front of him and his legal team requested my mental health records to imply that I was trying to end my life in this method. I spent lots of time out of work with ongoing back injuries, spent hundreds, thousands really, on physiotherapy, pain management, pain medication and doctors visits. I spent years trying a variety of pain medications, with god awful side effects4, and was incredibly lucky to have not become dependent on any of them. For long term pain patients, addiction is absolutely a real risk, and for whatever reason, I have managed to evade it, for which I will be eternally grateful.
I saw a psychiatrist who said that on top of the depression diagnosis I’d had prior to the accident (and the postpartum depression which arrived after the birth of my son), I also had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from the crash itself. It took me a long time to learn to drive5 because the sound of beeping cars triggered me. I had to practise crossing the road over and over again, particularly in the spot where the accident happened, as to ensure that I was not going to let this fear take over my life.
I am now over ten years on since the accident that changed my life.
I am most certainly one of the lucky ones and I know it. I have read about cases where accidents just like mine have ended with traumatic brain injuries leaving people with lifelong care needs. But just because I am luckier than they are, does not mean that I am fine, and does not diminish my pain and trauma.
I have, for the most part, defeated the PTSD demons, but I was reminded last year that I cannot be complacent with them. A medical television show, which I had been watching for years as a comfort watch, aired a scene where a pregnant woman, slightly further along than I had been, was hit head on by a car in the same way I was. This isn’t something that tends to be trigger-warning-ed, I guess it isn’t something that triggers the vast majority of people, or even a large subset of them, and it was the shock climax of the episode, but it sent me into a tailspin of nightmares and flashbacks and a whole lot of crying. I am okay now, I have a wonderful therapist, I have an incredible support system around me, but I am also hypervigilant about the fact that it CAN be triggered again. There is a website out there called Does The Dog Die which tracks trigger warnings, primarily around animal cruelty/animal death. I have since looked and found that there IS a section around car crashes but it isn’t very well updated, or very precise when it comes to television shows, so really, I will need to form my own “Does The Pregnant Woman Get Hit Head On By A Car Dot Com” to solve my own problem.
I am still in pain every single day. I have long-running back and neck injuries, and have spent thousands on pain management procedures, medications, consultants and doctors over the past decade. I am much better than I used to be - back when my son was a toddler, I was on heavy-duty pain medications which meant I was off work and he still had to be in childcare because I was in no fit state to take care of a child on my own. He (obviously unknowingly) broke my heart by telling me how much more he loved Granny than he loved me, because “Granny can lift me”. These days, I work full time, I’ve had my full driving licence for over five years, and the amount of pain medication I take has been greatly reduced. I have been taking anti-depressant medication for ten years and while the dosage has reduced over time, I don’t see a time where they will be completely eradicated from my routine and I have had to become fine with that. I have had to find workarounds for things I cannot do - my son has never known a “well” Mammy, so he doesn’t really know that he’s missing out on me going on the Waltzers with him, or that I would love to go into the trampoline park with him but can’t due to risk of further injury. I have had to get my head around knowing that there is a level of disappointment that he may have, and that I definitely have, in my not being able to do things.
I will always wonder which mother I could have been if I wasn’t the mother who was always in pain, and there is no way I can ever know this answer.
I will not be fixed. There’s a whole other post which I’m planning on writing about how hope of a fix has come and gone and left a trail of upset in its wake, but that is for another day. For the last two and a half years, I have worked on a lot of things in therapy but one of them is the anger I feel about my life circumstances. There’s been a lot of work done on “Just because other people have it worse does not make your pain any less valid”. We are absolutely not there yet, but we are getting there.
As Villain Origin Stories go, it’s no Batman, but it did point me towards a change in career in the end. Years of researching medical therapies and medicines felt like getting a medicine degree by proxy, and while I knew I was never going to make a doctor, it did guide me towards a Masters in Public Health where I was going to get to work in health research. I have a healthy ten year old son, a team of doctors and a therapist who I trust, and a small tight knit supportive group around me, even if my body isn’t playing ball.
And now I have this space, to share the experience of this life, which, if you’re still reading this far, thank you.
Before I was ever pregnant, a very not-fun abdominal pain incident meant that I was in the care of both A&E and the gynae wing of the maternity hospital, and they spent several months afterwards claiming that the other had my file and had lost it, when I was trying to follow up on the care that they had been giving me. Bureaucracy at it’s finest. I can only hope it has improved.
Even concussed, I prioritised texting my manager to let her know that I would not be in work today, because I’d been hit by a car and was in hospital but I would see her Monday. The delusion of that, especially given the reason I was contacting her at all was that my then-employer had STRONG sanctions against not showing up for work without calling - I think that text was sent even before I rang my parents. Needless to say, I was not in work on Monday.
About ten weeks later, I was refused to be sold a TENS machine in Boots because I’d mentioned to the pharmacist that I would be using it for pain relief in my neck and shoulders, as per my GP’s instructions, and they decided that it would be too risky to bring on early labour (it isn’t when it’s up there). I’m all for making sure pregnant people are made aware of risks to them and their foetus, but the combination of over-paternalism and some whisperings of the 8th Amendment definitely allowed for a lot more “Sure you’ll be grand, the baby is more important” stuff than should ever be acceptable.
Discovering you’re allergic to a variety of medications containing morphine is shit craic. Discovering that some people take the drugs that made you lose your mind as recreational fun is very confusing.
It may have taken six goes, but she’s a fully licenced driver who is never ever moving anywhere she has to take a driving test for ever again.