Whipped and Lashed
I just looked back at the (paucity of) posts since the beginning of the year and realized that I hadn't written anything about Zach's and my relatively recent experience as the filling in a three-car sandwich.
First things first: We were not seriously injured—no bleeding, no broken bones. (The car wasn't seriously injured either, although both bumpers needed to be replaced.)
We were heading home after my very first LA haircut when traffic slowed down in a hurry.
The car in front of us stopped.
We stopped.
The car behind us stopped, too—just not until it had knocked us into the car in front.
As soon as we stopped (the first time), I made the serious yet involuntary mistakes of a) tensing up and b) looking in the side-view mirror to see if there was anyone behind us.
That meant that a) my muscles were constricted at the moment of impact and b) I saw the crash coming. Not the best possible combination, let me tell you.
In an instant, I had a headache and neck, back, and shoulder pain. Later, when I was asked by the ER nurse to gauge my pain on a scale of one to 10, I rated it a six.
The accident happened just before 6:30PM, and it took about an hour for the police to arrive. (I'm told this is because we said we didn't need an ambulance.) By then we had exchanged all the usual information from our driver's licenses and insurance cards.
Fortunately, the driver of the third car immediately claimed responsibility for the accident, which simplified matters. We gave our statements to the police, and then Zach and I headed to an emergency room to get checked out.
We arrived right around 8PM, just after a mild earthquake struck. We missed it entirely—either we were in the car or walking across the parking lot to the ER entrance at the time—but people in the waiting room definitely felt it.
Seven hours, a battery of X-rays (for each of us), and a head CT (for me) later, we got back in the car and drove home, exhausted and stiff and sore.
Zach had had some back pain, but it abated almost immediately. Nearly six weeks later, I'm still contending with the after-effects of whiplash.
The irony is that the day of the accident, I had scheduled my first physical-therapy appointment so that I could embark on an exercise plan that would not further elevate my risk of lymphedema. That quickly morphed into treatment for soft-tissue damage, which continues still.
The first few weeks after the accident, I was incredibly jumpy in the car. If another vehicle looked to be encroaching on our lane, or bolted out in front of us from a side street or parking lot, or slowed down precipitously, I panicked. I sucked in my breath, clutched the door handle, and executed other maneuvers that could not have made it easy for Zach to remain calm behind the wheel—although remain calm he did, in spades.
The worst of that seems to be behind me, fortunately. I'm not quite sure what changed, but I'm grateful that it has.
However, I discovered this past week that my relative emotional comfort as a passenger has not translated to physical comfort as a driver. Driving has never been my favorite activity, and I hardly ever do it these days—Zach and I have only one car (the "only" seems absurd, I know, but this is Los Angeles), and I take public transportation to work. When we go places together, it's the exceedingly rare exception that I'm seated to his left en route.
But last week I found myself alone in the car twice in the space of 12 hours: for a dinner date with a friend and a doctor's appointment the next morning. Between the two trips, I had to look over my right shoulder several times—to back up or before I changed lanes—and it was not a pleasant sensation.
I'm sure I'll improve over time—especially with twice-weekly physical-therapy sessions that now include massage therapy as well. In the meantime, my driver's license is going to gather even more dust than usual.
First things first: We were not seriously injured—no bleeding, no broken bones. (The car wasn't seriously injured either, although both bumpers needed to be replaced.)
We were heading home after my very first LA haircut when traffic slowed down in a hurry.
The car in front of us stopped.
We stopped.
The car behind us stopped, too—just not until it had knocked us into the car in front.
As soon as we stopped (the first time), I made the serious yet involuntary mistakes of a) tensing up and b) looking in the side-view mirror to see if there was anyone behind us.
That meant that a) my muscles were constricted at the moment of impact and b) I saw the crash coming. Not the best possible combination, let me tell you.
In an instant, I had a headache and neck, back, and shoulder pain. Later, when I was asked by the ER nurse to gauge my pain on a scale of one to 10, I rated it a six.
The accident happened just before 6:30PM, and it took about an hour for the police to arrive. (I'm told this is because we said we didn't need an ambulance.) By then we had exchanged all the usual information from our driver's licenses and insurance cards.
Fortunately, the driver of the third car immediately claimed responsibility for the accident, which simplified matters. We gave our statements to the police, and then Zach and I headed to an emergency room to get checked out.
We arrived right around 8PM, just after a mild earthquake struck. We missed it entirely—either we were in the car or walking across the parking lot to the ER entrance at the time—but people in the waiting room definitely felt it.
Seven hours, a battery of X-rays (for each of us), and a head CT (for me) later, we got back in the car and drove home, exhausted and stiff and sore.
Zach had had some back pain, but it abated almost immediately. Nearly six weeks later, I'm still contending with the after-effects of whiplash.
The irony is that the day of the accident, I had scheduled my first physical-therapy appointment so that I could embark on an exercise plan that would not further elevate my risk of lymphedema. That quickly morphed into treatment for soft-tissue damage, which continues still.
The first few weeks after the accident, I was incredibly jumpy in the car. If another vehicle looked to be encroaching on our lane, or bolted out in front of us from a side street or parking lot, or slowed down precipitously, I panicked. I sucked in my breath, clutched the door handle, and executed other maneuvers that could not have made it easy for Zach to remain calm behind the wheel—although remain calm he did, in spades.
The worst of that seems to be behind me, fortunately. I'm not quite sure what changed, but I'm grateful that it has.
However, I discovered this past week that my relative emotional comfort as a passenger has not translated to physical comfort as a driver. Driving has never been my favorite activity, and I hardly ever do it these days—Zach and I have only one car (the "only" seems absurd, I know, but this is Los Angeles), and I take public transportation to work. When we go places together, it's the exceedingly rare exception that I'm seated to his left en route.
But last week I found myself alone in the car twice in the space of 12 hours: for a dinner date with a friend and a doctor's appointment the next morning. Between the two trips, I had to look over my right shoulder several times—to back up or before I changed lanes—and it was not a pleasant sensation.
I'm sure I'll improve over time—especially with twice-weekly physical-therapy sessions that now include massage therapy as well. In the meantime, my driver's license is going to gather even more dust than usual.
posted by Jody Rosen Knower at 2:06 PM
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