DECEMBER 19, 2019

My body wants to heal. I am giving it tools, treatments and time — and it’s finally beginning to respond, after over three horrific months without any even remotely consistent semblances of progress. I woke up today feeling like my face had been repeatedly slammed head-on, a direct result of injections, facial and oral treatments, but now return home at the end of a long day of appointments with far less pain, far less swelling, far less agony.

 

As I lay on the table in the hands of my therapist today, she noted how responsive my body is to this work, enabling us to get more done with and in between each session. We began by moving through the trauma, the physicality of the accident, the moment of impact, not only repeating exercises we’ve done before wherein she lowers my body to the ground in the precise way I fell to the asphalt, but going even deeper — leaning in further, acknowledging the sudden, shifting, serious and subtle musculoskeletal tension, lying on my face in the exact position I hit the ground for a prolonged, uncomfortable, even painful period, especially for my still-fractured eye socket, still-impacted teeth, still-damaged jaw and still-compressed neck. Reliving the trauma allows for revelations about and release of both physical and psychological blockages, consequences and needs. She began the hands-on healing work around spinal tension, particularly towards its top where my neck meets the back, as mobility has been impaired and pained since the accident, similar and clearly complementary to what my osteopath did in focusing on spinal nerve centers earlier this week.

 

But what really hit me is what happened next, when she directly addressed my face — which is something of a disaster right now, red, raw and swollen with scabs, bruises and severe pain. She gently, yet pointedly worked on my eye socket, my cheek, my upper lip, my jaw — all of which are either fractured, recently operated on, or just injected with heavy duty needles. Within minutes, I felt the temperature of my face palpably shift, cooling down from the dreadful burning sensation that hadn’t ceased in days — reminiscent of the positive effects of some of the biofeedback therapy I’ve done to manipulate physiological systems, albeit through a different methodology. By the end of the session, I experienced a significant reduction in facial pain to the touch, discoloration and misshapenness (which is hereby a word in this jumbled brain of mine). Day by day, alongside a wide array of doctors and specialists, I learn more, I do more, I trust more, I receive more — and although it may not always feel as such or happen at the pace I wish or in the ways I would expect, this body of mine has indeed been healing in powerful incremental ways.