Bed BACK and Beyond
Sharing positive stories of recovery after a herniated disc or other spinal cord injury. Join herniated disc champion CK as she has informative and encouraging conversations with other back injury survivors. From people who elected to have back surgery (microdiscectomy, laminectomy, fusion, etc) to those who used more conservative methods, plus all things in between, join our podcast, and let's talk about how life can move beyond the bed after injury. If you are dealing with the isolation and despair that often accompanies a serious back or neck injury, then you'll love being a part of these stories of hope and recovery.
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Bed BACK and Beyond
Paralysis to Purpose: Erica's Inspiring Journey from Tragedy to Triumph
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Imagine being a successful business owner and mother, and then, in an instant, everything changes due to a devastating car accident. This episode of Bed, Back, and Beyond brings you the awe-inspiring story of Erica Sosna, who faced the unimaginable challenge of being paralyzed from the waist down after a car accident during a snowstorm in December 2022. Erica provides an unflinching account of her traumatic experience, from the terrifying 45 minutes trapped under a vehicle to the daunting realization of her spinal injury's long-term implications. Her narrative is a poignant reminder of the unpredictability of life and the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit.
In our conversation, Erica delves into the emotional and physical hurdles she encountered on her road to recovery. She recounts the intense pain and isolation during her hospital stay, the grueling rehabilitation process, and the mental resilience required to regain mobility and find a new normal. Listeners will gain insight into the therapeutic approaches that played pivotal roles in her healing journey, including McTimoney chiropractic care, Frequency Specific Microcurrent (FSM), and acupuncture. Erica also speaks openly about the significant impact her injury had on her family dynamics, underscoring the importance of a supportive partner in navigating such life-altering events.
But Erica's story doesn't end with recovery. She bravely shares how she found purpose and strength in returning to her career and even launching a new podcast, “The Career Equation,” aimed at guiding others through their professional journeys. Erica’s story is not just one of survival but of adaptation and triumph, offering valuable insights and inspiration for anyone facing adversity. Join us for an episode filled with raw honesty, hope, and a testament to the power of resilience.
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Have a positive story of recovery to tell? Head over to https://bedbackbeyond.com/share-your-story/ to apply.
Survivor of Paralysis Shares Recovery
Speaker 1I don't know if people have ever considered it, but if you are paralysed from anywhere below your hips, then you're paralysed inside and outside. So there are all kinds of things about your bowel, your bladder, your sexual function, your digestion that are really problematic, and managing those outside of your home is really stressful and then in places that you don't know. You know, I used to love to kind of go to new cities and wander around and have long walks, and I can't do that because I don't know when I'm going to run out of energy, I don't know where I am, I don't know how long it's going to take me to get back. So I really feel less abled the further I am away from home.
Speaker 2Welcome to Bed Back and Beyond, sharing positive stories of recovery from serious back or neck injury. Your host is CK, a fellow champion who draws on her own experience with herniated disc surgery. Join her as she talks with others who have overcome the physical and emotional trauma of a painful injury and discover for yourself how you can find hope and encouragement in recovery.
Speaker 3Hi Erica. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Bed, back and Beyond. Before we jump into your injury, how about you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 1Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much for inviting me to be here today. So my name is Erica Sosner and in December 2022, I was dragged under a car and broke 15 bones, but the most serious of which was my back, leading to a spinal cord injury at T12, which left me paralyzed from the waist down.
Speaker 3Oh my goodness, sorry, what year was that? Again, that was.
Speaker 1December 2022. So we're coming on for like 20 months. Wow, at that time, I was a mother of a two-year-old. I was running a very successful consulting careers consulting business that I'd grown from scratch, with blood, sweat and tears, and was running a team and we were on a kind of growth trajectory. So, yeah, it was a pretty major, full stop, cataclysmic event in my life just about two weeks before Christmas Day.
Speaker 3Were you just crossing the street? How did that happen? Yeah, it was a little bit.
Speaker 1It was a little bit fiddly. So I was on my way to a yoga workshop and the sun was shining and I was crossing over this beautiful hillside near where I live. My gym is, like you know, 10 minutes drive, beautiful drive and halfway across the drive, to my surprise, it started snowing. I hadn't really been paying attention that day to the weather or whatever. It didn't look like it was going to snow, but I didn't think that much of it because it seemed to be pretty light and I thought it was quite fun and sweet and Christmassy. But by the time that I got to my studio, the yoga teacher had decided to postpone the class because the snow was continuing and other people live deeper into the countryside. So we all turned around and came back and I decided to go the same route that I had come across, over the hills rather than on the motorway. And that was a bad decision because sort of five minutes later it'd gone from really really light snow to really heavy snow and because I was up high on a hill, it was really coming down heavy and because there wasn't lots of traffic, it was also staying there. So what happened was I was about five minutes from home when I realized that I wasn't going to be able to get up the last hill. Car kept sliding back and, unfortunately for me, where I was didn't have any lay-bys. I couldn't stop off the road because either side there was quite a steep verge now covered in snow, and so I couldn't get off the road. So I put my like hazards on and I got ready to leave the car and then someone came up behind me and I expected them to stop behind me because they could see I was on a hill. And I got ready to leave the car and then someone came up behind me and I expected them to stop behind me because they could see I was on a hill and I was stuck. But they didn't. They tried to accelerate past me, thereby blocking the other side of the road. That incoming vehicles were coming down the hill and I'm here in the UK, so by that I mean the right-hand side of our roads, right, so the wrong side of the road for people coming down Okay, he also. He tried to accelerate past me, he failed and that meant that he and I were parallel in the road, blocking the road at the bottom of a hill in a snowstorm, and I just knew that something bad was going to happen. Like my heckles went up. I just knew. I sort of started yelling at the guy going you need to get out the road, you're blocking the road, you need to get out the road. And, as I said that, a car came down the hill towards us. Now that first car managed to slow down enough to. It did hit us, but my airbags didn't even go off. He'd really slowed down a lot. So now there's three cars Now the road is definitely full and I attempt to get out the car and as I get out, I have to get out into the road and I get out and as I do, a fourth car comes down the hill and I can see that this car is like hell to skelter.
Speaker 1It's completely lost control. I turn my back to walk away and then the next thing that I know I'm under the car and I'm being dragged. So the car had gone through all three of our cars. It had taken me, dragged me, 200 meters. It turned and I was like under it going. I'm under the car, I'm under the car Like I was.
Speaker 1I didn't know how I'd got there, oh, wow. And then I saw the car turn and I thought, oh my God, if it flips it's going to land on me and that is literally this is my last moment on earth. But it didn't flip, it spun and it stopped. But in stopping it spat me out between the verge and the back wheel of the car. So I was trapped between the two. But even if I wasn't you know I was. I had to be cut out eventually.
Speaker 1But even if I hadn't been trapped, my legs weren't working, like I knew immediately. I was lying there and I couldn't feel them. It was like one minute they were my legs and the next minute there was just a kind of cloud of air where the intention that was my legs had been and I could not move and I knew that any pain or just actually, amazingly, no. If you have a very severe spinal injury, your body goes into spinal shock and that means that it shuts down everything it can to save your spinal cord, because obviously spinal cord is like the fuse box for everything that your body does. And so, remarkably, I don't remember a lot of pain, wow, which I think made people think, oh, maybe she's just cold and that's why she can't move her legs. I wasn't screaming with pain or whatever.
Speaker 1I was quite sentient, but I knew that I couldn't feel my legs and I knew that I had a spinal injury and someone tried to drag me out and I really yelled at him because I was like, don't touch me, my back is broken and I have no idea whether I have taken my last step in life or if you leave me the hell alone, I might walk again and that's going to make the difference.
Speaker 1But I even had the sentience to say to the people who I couldn't see, I could only hear, because I couldn't move my my head was just trapped against the wheel um, can someone please go up the hill and flag off the next cars, because the next one will kill me, because they don't know I'm here. So could you please stop flapping around me and someone go up there and tell them there's a massive crash down there. If you get into it you could get hurt. But also you need to. You need to drive off into one of the fields to left and right Cause, otherwise you're going to run me over and I'll be dead.
Speaker 3So so you're directing from under.
Speaker 1True, so you're a business owner, true, but also just thinking about my son. Son, I was like I'm five minutes from home, I can't die. I, you know this can't be. I'm on my way back home for Christmas holidays. This is not happening to me, I'm not dying here. So, yeah, and then probably it took like 45 minutes to get me because the snow was really bad and they had to get fire engines and by the time that they arrived, you know, it had started to hurt, not so much my back, but I'd broken pretty much every rib and I'd punctured a lung, so breathing was starting to be painful and the kind of shock was wearing off, I guess. And I, you know so, I remember it. Then you know, so, yeah, that was what happened.
Speaker 3And so the 45 minutes you're underneath the car, the ambulance, I'm assuming, comes in and gets you. Did the paramedics have anything to tell you what kind of condition you were in, or was it all just waiting till you get to the emergency room?
Speaker 1I mean, one of the things that I'm sure that anyone listening who has an SCI will tell you is that there is so much ambiguity around spinal cord injuries. No one will tell you anything because they don't know. Spinal cord is like a fingerprint like you can, you can all break your t12 or your c3 or whatever, and each of you will have completely different consequences and side effects and so so very you know, no one will say anything committal. But you know, I vaguely remember the conversation with the paramedic. Obviously they dosed me pretty strongly, like immediately they had to get me out from under the car, they had to get me, you know, onto a stretcher in the snow, up the road and stuff, and by then you know it would have hurt, like.
Speaker 1So I don't really remember all of those bits, but I do vaguely remember saying you know, I can't feel my legs, I can slightly move my left toe. What does that mean? What do you think that means? But I'm a big believer in, like, the power of your mind and the way that you use your mind and I knew it was very important that I didn't panic, that that I was like I am here, I am breathing, nobody knows, yet I know I can't move my legs. That might be the last yoga workshop I ever attend. Those might be the last steps I've ever stepped, but I need to stay alive because I have a two-year-old and he needs me and I'm going to do that. So I was pretty calm from my recollection.
Speaker 3Yeah, wow, yeah. And so how long did you stay in the hospital? Four months, four months in the hospital. How did you get ahold of your family once they got you to the hospital?
Speaker 1Yeah. So it took a while because there was no reception there. I'd asked a few people to call my husband because my husband was five minutes away and I wanted him to be there and to know what had happened to me and nobody did or could and my phone was left in the car. So it took until I was in the hospital for me to give someone his number and the police came along they said do you want anything from the car? And I said I think I think my phone is there. Can you call my husband? Can you call call?
Speaker 1We don't really have any family or like super close friends who could babysit nearby. So when he came he brought my two-year-old, who was pretty panicked and, you know, obviously wanted to touch me and get on me, which he couldn't do right. So actually I had to send them home pretty much immediately and and ask a friend to come and be with me instead of him, because it just wasn't the right. You know my son needed to get home and not see me like that and we weren't going to be able to sort of control him to keep me or him safe. So but you know I had no idea at that point obviously that I would be in hospital for months. I mean, I knew it was bad. I knew it was bad, but the first thing that they did was give me loads of ketamine so they could drain my lung.
Speaker 1And so the next thing that I remember is going ah, I'm flying play. Oh no, I'm not, I'm, I'm here. And as I woke up, they they're like right, we need to explain to you we're going to perform some emergency surgery to try and save your legs. We need to explain to you what's going to happen and get your consent. And I remember saying to them I'm high, I'm high like how can you possibly consent to or understand what you're telling me? Right, I'm filled with like ketamine and morphine and fentanyl and goodness knows what else. How can I consent? And anyway, I'm not going to say no, like right, say you think you can save my legs, then I'm going to let you have a go. But I'm just saying you know, like previous to my spinal cord injury, apart from having my son, I had actually broken my, fractured my neck 15 years before by diving into swimming pool, which is how a lot of people spinal cord injury is pretty bad, but I just walked out of the pool.
Speaker 1I was very lucky. I just fractured the bone. I didn't hurt the cord. But apart from that and having my son, I'd never been in hospital no appendix, no tonsillitis, no covid like I'd never been in hospital. So I really knew nothing about like how the how the system worked and kind of consents and medicalization, and I was about to find out an awful lot about that. Yeah, so basically I then had what they call a spinal fusion, so they fuse two vertebrae above and two vertebrae below to stabilize the bit that was broken, and then they put in what they call harring rods, so like titanium rods, that's like a kind of scaffold. It's sort of like a cast for your spine, because your spine's in there and they can't put a cast on it. So they go in and they literally put these enormous screws and scaffolds to hold the injury in place until it recovers, to hold it in the correct place and therefore, in my case, to take the pressure off my cord.
Speaker 3Okay, was your spinal cord partially severed at all, or was it just so compressed and that's why you couldn't feel your legs?
Speaker 1Yeah, it was really severely compressed. Okay, again, it's quite hard even from like an MRI or whatever to tell that something is or isn't. I could feel people touching parts of me so I had some skin based sensation and I could move my left foot a little bit. I didn't move my right leg at all and I couldn't move any other parts of my left hand side from the waist down except for my foot. So I knew it was bad.
Speaker 1But what they explained was I mean, I was lucky in a lot of ways. Firstly, like it was a Sunday night at like 2am and one of the most experienced surgeons in the country was in that day. So they bumped whoever had then deservedly scheduled operation and stuck me in the priority. Because with a spinal cord injury the timing is really important that the less time that you can be with your injury, especially compressed and not severed if they think there's a chance they can release it, the quicker they do that, the less damage you have. But nobody could tell at that point if I was ever going to walk again or not. I mean I think they said something like you've got an 80% chance of not walking again, which means 20% chance of walking again, that's for fairly low odds and we're about to do a nine hour surgery and after that surgery you will need to lie flat on your back for 24 hours for five days.
Speaker 3Yeah, so how long was it between you arriving at the hospital and then getting the spinal fusion?
Speaker 1Maybe eight, 10 hours. They had to sort out my lung because I couldn't breathe so well, and then they had to do MRIs and scans and things, and then they had to prep me for surgery. So I guess I had to be nailed by mouse for a certain amount of time and then the surgery itself was something like between six and eight hours. I can't exactly remember.
Speaker 3Holy cow. So you get the surgery, but you still had to stay in the hospital for four months. Yeah.
Speaker 1Why was that? Months? Yeah, why was that? Uh, because, well, cause I couldn't move. So you have the surgery. For five days after that you're in basically in solitary flat on your back, which is super scary because I had all these broken, other broken bones, and so when you you can't cough because your ribs are broken, you can't sit up, and so when you have kind of phlegm on your chest which I had quite a lot of, you're basically choking and you have to be taught ways to do kind of respiratory rehab so that you can breathe. If you can't do that, then they stick a track in you, right? So that's all you know.
Speaker 1So then, like I've had all these injuries, now I've also got a very major injury in the back of my body and the you know the work of the surgeon in there, all this metal and stuff. And then you know gradually over the next week, surgeon in there, all this metal and stuff, and then you know gradually over the next week or two they get you at like 20 degrees, 40 degrees, until you're sort of 45 degrees, and then at about sort of 10 days to two weeks they tried to get me to sit up. And if you've ever been flat on your back for 10 days and then you sit up, you pass out. I was only flat on your back for 10 days, and then you sit up, you pass out. I was only flat on my back for three days. It's not fun, right, and it's kind of so the equilibrium goes and it takes you a while to just have that, you know. And also, spinal cord injury really makes your blood pressure low anyway. So the first step is can we get you to sit up without passing out? And then can we get you to stand and you passing out, and then can we get you to stand, and you stand on these kind of they put your feet down and obviously my feet can't bear any, can't do anything at that time. So you're holding on for dear life to these kind of joysticks and they then lift the joysticks and you go up with them to see if you can be perpendicular. So that was the first thing.
Speaker 1Then it was Christmas, so everyone bogged off for Christmas and New Year and there just weren't really any people available. And then they, they got me a wheelchair and then I had to learn how to transfer out of the bed into the wheelchair. But even sitting in a wheelchair was something I could only do for a couple of minutes. So I was just too poorly to be anywhere else except the hospital for at least a month. And then they were waiting to get me into a spinal rehab hospital. I was in Stoke, mandeville, which is the national spinal unit here in the UK. But you can't just get into there like that. It takes a while.
Speaker 1So I was injured on December the 11th. They said we'll get you into Stoke by the end of January. There'll be a space for you, and there was. So my son's birthday was on the 19th of January. I did come home for like a few hours to be here for his birthday.
Speaker 1But when I got here, that's when I realized, okay, like my life is going to change forever. Like I can't do anything. I can't stand up to make a cup of tea, I can't pick him up from the floor, I can't get into my bathroom, and even if I could, I couldn't get onto that toilet. I am pretty seriously injured. And then the next two months at Stoke were about seeing if I could get better. So then I I moved from the wheelchair to crutches and like I really needed those crutches because both legs didn't work.
Speaker 1I, you know, the first time that I got to have an actual shower was like seven weeks after the injury and I just cried and cried, and cried, and that was with like three people helping me. That's the other thing about spinal cord like you have to learn to quickly develop. No shame, because someone's got to help you. Go to the toilet, actually go to the toilet, not just visit the toilet, but proceed. You know the procedure of the toilet. Um, someone's got to wash you, dry you, everything you can't. You're like you know work. They're more incompetent than a baby.
Speaker 1So, getting to actually just be on crutches a little bit, being able to sit on a shower chair and wash my own body, even if it took me an hour to get dressed on my own office, those were like big, big milestones right, and I was really desperate to get home. So by the time that I could walk up the stairs there's that being like the stairs would take me half an hour, but I could do it. Once I could do that, I was like I'm going home now, and so I had to sort of start rehabbing on my own. From the time that I discharged myself early, they would have liked me to stay about six months, wow nope getting home.
Speaker 1I'm going home. I've missed enough my little boy already.
Speaker 3At what point in the hospital did you have a almost emotional realization? I mean, you were acting as the emergency director while still under the car and then I imagine it was so much information thrown at you at once. Once you're at the hospital, Did you have a switch of an emotional response at all?
Speaker 1I did, but it was very intermittent. I mean, first of all, you're on a lot of morphine, so my response to morphine is to become pretty chill, even given the circumstances. But often I think what would happen is they would combine that with a different drug. I was on something called gabapentin, which is a nerve drug, and when those two things went in at the same time they would often make me like super agitated. I'd get really hot, really itchy, really panicky.
Speaker 1When I was moved up to the neuro ward I was in a bay with six other people and none of us could get out of bed. So there'd be nights where I was just kind of scream, snot, ugly crying, because I really wanted to go home and I really missed my husband and I was really scared and I couldn't bear to be away from my boy. And it's like New Year's Eve and you know, hospitals are incredibly hot in the UK and I couldn't see the sky and I didn't know what was going to happen and like you'd be sort of ugly cry, boohooing in front of six people who couldn't even come and pat you on the shoulder. They could just say from their bed, you know, hey, are you okay, like me, you know. So, yeah, I mean there were definitely like moments of breakdown.
Speaker 1Just you know, by the time I got to rehab also, just the pain of it. You know the like, the drudge of it, the uncertainty. If you're lucky enough to be incomplete and I do consider myself to be very fortunate because I had neither a traumatic brain injury nor complete paralysis right the downside is that you live in this place of real uncertainty because you don't know where your body is going to end up. You don't know if you will, you know what you will be able to do and you can't really plan. Therefore, like my sort of roommate also had a t12 injury, she fell through her loft hatch and her injury was complete, which is absolutely devastating, really challenging, because she is an a single woman. So support is, you know, differently structured than in a family setup. But you know where you are right. So you, so you begin from. You know a sort of shocking baseline, but a clear baseline. When you're incomplete, you don't know what. The baseline changes every day and therefore for me, the kind of obligation to work as fast and as hard and as far as I could to get away from that baseline was, you know it's very painful and uncertain, yeah, and so I sort of found that uncertainty.
Speaker 1You know someone who told me definitively either you'll never walk again, or you will definitely walk again, or you will definitely be running and sprinting by this time next year. That would have been helpful, but no one will. So, yeah, and I was. I was, you know. I've spent 18 months working my ass off. Yeah, lots of really eclectic things as well as more conventional things, and I do walk now, and I also ride a bike and do yoga. The goals that I'd set myself were ride a bike, do yoga and run. I'm away from running yet, but I'm pretty determined that I'm going to make all three.
Speaker 3Is there a residual back pain from the fusion there?
Speaker 1was for a long time, for a good sort of 10 months after, I could actually hear it creak as I walked up the stairs I could hear it and feel it move beside me and that was extremely disconcerting. And yeah, the sort of muscles around the rods would hurt a lot, not so much the actual rods which is weird because it's like a random massive piece of metal in your back right, but almost like the soft tissue around it would get really tired really quickly. And this time last year I would have to lie down like every hour or 90 minutes or so and just lie flat and let the rods kind of go like kind of back back into the ground back at you know, sort of not work against gravity nowadays. I don't really feel, you know, if I, if I think about it, I can feel where they are and obviously it restricts my movement but it doesn't hurt anymore. But I do think having them removed because they're just there, like cause it's difficult to get them out, they aren't, they don't actually need to be there. Okay, so that is the kind of ongoing conversation with my surgeon. Mostly they keep them in because there's no especially, you know, needful reason to take them out and it's still major surgery to take them out. But when someone is a bit younger and they're a bit more mobile and they make a scene about it, they, they might take them out, you know, in the next year or two. But that in itself is also a major operation that I'll then have to recover from. So, yeah, ought to be taken lightly, but it was more.
Speaker 1Just, some muscles work and some don't.
Speaker 1Like I, my quads were really strong and that's why I could stand up and kind of shuffle along, but I'm, you know, my butt didn't work, my hamstrings didn't work, my calves didn't work, my toes didn't work, my ankles didn't work.
Speaker 1So walking with your quads is like if you've ever had, like those ski shoes, you know, this sort of tennis rackets on your feet and you can't like lift your feet off the ground. That's what I had to work with, that's how I, and in order to make that movement I had to compensate for the lion's share of my muscles not working at all. And then over the last year, gradually, like a fuse box, one and two and three have come on, but I'm still short of the muscles in my calf and in my toes to raise my heels and push off my foot, which is what gives you the momentum to run and jump and move freely. So I'm still fairly disabled, but I'm a long distance from where I was, as in, I couldn't. Even if my foot fell off the bed, which it did often, I couldn't put it back.
Speaker 3Are you still actively? Are you working with a physiotherapist or have you been doing a lot of your recovery on your own?
Speaker 1First I needed a lot of support because I just physically couldn't do a lot of things by myself. Now I can do a lot of things myself myself, but I need the discipline of somebody spending time with me. So once I checked out of UK rehab and I partly checked myself out because I was getting like four hours of physio a week or something and I was two hours away from home and I was like I can get more physio than this at home and not be away from my family. So as soon as I was kind of well enough to survive, I just went and found my own team. So I have a neurophysio who comes to my home and she specializes in spinal cord injuries and she's been working with me now for like 16 months and she's brilliant Becky Eason her name is and so she's watched that gradual recovery. I also work with NeuroConnects, which is a charity set up by the Christopher Reeve Foundation that specialize in using like sports rehab and stims of various kinds. So we use a lot of kind of electrical stimulation for spinal cord injury and I work with them and I used to go every week. Now I go like once every three weeks but I still go. But I also did a bunch of other things that I think made a huge difference because I have unusually for someone with spinal cord injury no neuropathic pain and no spasms. So I really want to tell your listeners about what I did, because I did some things that are not very conventional, okay, please. So the first is that I had acupuncture every week from the first week of my spinal cord injury, and acupuncture is an amazing and ancient tradition, and anyone who tells you, oh, but there isn't like a research body for it, it's like uh, dude, they were writing like how to fix all kinds of conditions using needles on the back of like ox bones 3 000 years ago. So there is a lot longer tradition around acupuncture than there is about western medicine, and what's about acupuncture is that it looks at the whole body in a completely different systematic way, and if you've got a spinal cord injury, you will know that the reason that you can't move is because some of your channels are blocked, some of your receptors do not work, and acupuncture is all about channels and receptors. In a nutshell, so acupuncture was huge, really, really helpful for pain, for scarring, and I really think it's why I don't have any of the really kind of debilitating neuropathies.
Speaker 1I also use something before the injury I'd use something called mctimony which is a very gentle spinal mechanic work. It is a form of chiropractic but it's not like click, click, bang, bang. It's very gentle and I'd used it before because I always had a wobbly pelvis so I needed about once a month to get adjusted and mctimony got me straight and often relieved pain and discomfort and muscular discomfort that I had from being all twisted up from the spinal injury. So that's something I still use. And perhaps most importantly is something called frequency specific microcurrent, the website's frequency specificcom.
Speaker 1It is a way of gently giving the body a jumpstart using electricity. It doesn't hurt at all, it doesn't sound, it doesn't hurt like it sounds. It doesn't hurt at all but it is a way of matching the frequencies of different parts of the body. It was used to heal broken bones. The Victorians and Edwardians used it for broken bones and it is incredibly powerful modality for like the things you can't see, because spinal cord injuries, like the scarring and the trauma and the inflammation, are mostly in places that you can't see and touch so it's very difficult to intervene on them. And so frequency fsm has been like really, really helpful and it cures all kinds of things like lyme disease and fibromyalgia and shingles and things like that that people don't know. It's like the best thing that you don't know about, right?
Speaker 3Obviously, I've never heard of it.
Speaker 1Exactly, and obviously the pharmaceutical environment don't want you to know about it because it works like it cures things, so they really don't want you to know about that. So, frequenciespecificcom, you know it's really amazing and it's not that. It's really not woo like it's used by like physios and you know very highly trained people. It's not in the realm of like Reiki or energy healing or you know, if you feel like it's sort of in that it's not, it is a science thing. So those three things really made like a huge difference and they're things that I add in and would always encourage people to look into if you can afford to do so.
Speaker 3I have a girlfriend who's an acupuncturist in California and I keep meaning to have her on the podcast, so you've just inspired me to just ask her to be a guest.
Speaker 1Yeah, for sure, I mean what I learned. You know I had been exposed to acupuncture before and definitely helped me with like niggles. You know I didn't have anything like super serious, but it was really interesting to learn like how some of the acupuncturists like specialize in like scarring and reducing like scarring internally internally. Some people focusing on trauma. Some people are really about, like in Chinese medicine, the focus is on wellness, not on ill health. If one of your patients dies, you have to hang a lantern outside your door to say you failed them. You know you are supposed to treat them, to keep them well. So it's a completely different way of thinking and really, really powerful. So definitely something to check out.
Speaker 3And how has your family come through this? I imagine it was just as traumatic for them as it was for you.
Speaker 1It was pretty sucky. I mean, I'm lucky to have a husband who's pretty like stoic as a character. Uh, he was sort of like okay, this is really terrible for us, this is really terrible for erica. How do we just get through this step by step? So, you know, he was single-handed with our, our son, for all of those four months, yeah, and they had a great relationship anyway, but they're like super close now.
Speaker 1You know, I sometimes feel like I'm, you know, kind of the very much the second in command, because there are things I just can't do and things that it isn't safe for me to do unsupervised with my son. So, like you know, gallivanting around in nature or kind of very physical activities, I need another pair of hands in case he runs or he gets hurt. And also we were very fortunate because my husband was retired and so he had a lot of time to hold on to everything and then start doing, you know, all the laundry, all the. You know shopping and you know. So at the beginning there were, you know, there was very little that I could do to contribute to the house. I certainly couldn't like make a bed or go shopping. I remember dragging myself around like Quasimodo around the supermarket and, like you know, 40 seconds in realizing I can't even get to the till, like how am I going to get out of here? Very forceful about you know, pushing myself towards things probably before I was ready, but even things like you know cooking a meal. You know I'd be able to do the meal prep and cook a meal, and then I have to go and lie down for four hours because I've broken myself from trying to do this thing.
Speaker 1Being upright was very, very difficult, whereas now I can do pretty much, you know, a full day of like home and work and childcare, except if I'm away from home. When I'm away from home I realize how disabled I am. I don't know if people have ever considered it, but if you are paralyzed from anywhere below your hips, then you're paralyzed inside and outside. So there are all kinds of things about your bowel, your bladder, your sexual function, your digestion that are really problematic and managing those outside of your home is really stressful. And then in places that you don't know, you know I used to love to kind of go to new cities and wander around and have long walks and I can't do that because I don't know when I'm going to run out of energy. I don't know where I am, I don't know how long it's going to take me to get back, so I really feel less abled the further I am away from home.
Speaker 1From home, I've got you know rituals, I know the environment, I've got you know support around me and and also I've got rehab structure around me. And that's the other thing. I did loads, I do loads and loads and loads of things in the water, because you can do water you can't do on land. So also I need access to a pool, I need access to a gym. So, being somewhere else, I often realize, okay, I'm still quite an injured person, whereas I'm sometimes able to forget that at home. But my family have been, yeah, completely amazing.
Speaker 3How do you process that emotionally?
Speaker 1It's up and down. I had some EMDR, like the post eye movement therapy. I don't really understand how it works, but it sort of did and it worked for the injury itself, so like, and the accident itself, because I have to drive over the accident site almost every day to get to my gym and I can go past it and go. It was there and that's kind of, you know, very rarely hits me in any way. I suppose my predominant emotion that I really struggle with is kind of grief at the things that I feel like I'm missing out with as my son gets bigger, like I can't carry him and soon, even if I fully recover, which I probably won't but you know, even if I recover more soon, I won't be able to carry him because he's, you know, too big. So I feel super sad about that and things like not being able to just chase him up and down the garden and and and like really simple, but they kind of. We went to a festival recently and it was a total disaster, way too ambitious for me, way too big a scale of thing to do, and I feel quite like look at all these people just walking, just doing their walking everywhere, just getting up and walking without even thinking about it. They're just walking to go to the cafe and they're just walking in front and they're just doing their walking. Like I get super pissed about, you know, the simplicity and effortlessness with which people move about, because every step that I take fires a measure of thought, increasingly less and less. But you know, yeah, so mainly like grief and kind of frustration and anger and I get kind of down about you know, now I'm in this sort of grunt work recovery phase. So it's like, on the one hand, wow, amazing, you've recovered like 80% of your function, but on the other hand, it's the last 20% that will truly give me my freedom and my life back, and I don't know how much of that I will get. And I'm crawling along with these little increments and yeah, it's tough.
Speaker 1But I remember being in the hospital and you know I've kept a diary for like 35 years, not every day but fairly consistently, and I did not want to write about the injury and the hospital, not interested in capturing any of it. I was like I have no desire to remember any of this shit, but one of the few things that I did write down, I've written a book 2014, called your Life Plan, which is all about like how to project manage your life to get the things that I did write down. I've written a book, 2014, called your life plan, which is all about like how to project manage your life to get the things that you want, and there's a method in that called life projecting, which is about starting with the end in mind, getting clear what you want to do, run, swim normally, whatever and then working backwards from there, and the one thing that I did write was this is a life project, and one of the things that I teach in my method is accept it as though you chose it. You know, when crappy things happen, the more that you resist it, the more energy is wasted on it like it's a reality.
Speaker 1I've had a spinal cord injury. I'm paralyzed from the waist down and I don't know where I'm going to end up. That is fucking shit. Let's go. You know all I can do is to move away from where I am now. If I collapse back into that's really going to make it much worse for me. Okay, so that has always been like kind of guiding philosophy, and I think that really, really helped a lot.
Speaker 3I was just about to ask you what would you say to someone who is just beginning their spinal cord injury journey? What's the name of the book? Again?
Speaker 1It's called your Life Plan. I have a couple of books, but that's the one that's really for the individual going through kind of transformatory experience. And that would be, you know, like, accept it as though you chose it. I mean, that's the kind of crazy thing to say, isn't it? Something terrible has happened to you, but what other choice do you have, like you know, and that that doesn't mean that you immediately find peace with it or it doesn't cause you pain or you don't rage against the circumstance. But arguing with the circumstance is really just what you resist persists. You know, it's kind of. The thing is as it is. What can you do to move forward from there and more towards the things that you want and and the life that you can have? And that is not to say that you're not entitled to your grief or or your pain, like and I'm not saying that you escape those things, I'm just saying that being mindful about how you work with yourself around it is really important.
Speaker 1And the other thing I would say is, like, do not accept the medical model as the only way to get better. Like you know, I obsessively I'd stay up late and watch loads and loads and loads and loads of like videos from people who had a spinal injury, who you know the ways in which they recovered, whether they were wheeling or whether they were independent. You know all these different rehab centers. I read hundreds of books on like spontaneous recovery and you know why people heal. And you know, and I wasn't that interested if the medics didn't know and were therefore weren't prepared to tell me a prognosis, then I wasn't that interested in really what they had to say about much else.
Speaker 1And the other thing that's really challenging with a spinal injury is that you have someone who performs your surgery and that's your spinal surgeon, but then, because you've had a spinal injury, you have problems throughout your body, as I said, you know your bladder, your bowels, maybe you can't use your hands when you're on a vent. You, you know you've got neuropathy in your feet. All of those require a different specialism and a different doctor in the medical western model. So really don't stop there, go and find something that's more holistic and it doesn't. It doesn't have to be where. If woo works for you, then great, do woo right. But like it isn't either or isn't like either it's medically proven or it's bullshit. There is like loads of things in between that and don't accept just what Western medicine has to say, because you have to go and see hundreds of different practitioners to cater to all of your issues, whereas in some of the other alternative medicine models you can see one person who will treat a lot of things and give you a lot of benefit.
Speaker 3Erica, thank you so much. That is a lot for people to think about and so thankful that you're willing to come on and just share your journey and be transparent with your experience. Have you been able to focus on your career again?
Speaker 1Yeah, thank you for asking. It's been hard, you know. I mean, if you run your own thing, then there's a limited amount of sick pay and sick leave that you can take. Eventually, you've either got to get back in the seat or shut the thing down. And I was fortunate enough to have work that I really liked, that I was really good at and that I could still theoretically do post-injury injury.
Speaker 1It definitely took me a few months to kind of find my feet and my energy. I probably could have done with another six months off, but I think what it really prompted me to do was to move from the work that we do with the career equation. We work primarily with big companies and with their talent to help them to really pinpoint what they want out of their career, and it really motivated me to go. How can I touch many, many more people than that? Because you're kind of restricted, therefore, by only working with a company that's given you permission to work with their people, and so, on the back of that, I decided I was going to start a podcast, and that goes live in a couple of weeks, on the 14th of September.
Speaker 1So I decided I would start a new podcast and that's called the Career Equation, and the Career Equation podcast is a way of empowering lots of people to be able to use the equation method to get super clear about what's working and not working in their career by listening to people's real life stories and career moments where we help them each week to solve a career conundrum. So that's been an incredibly energizing and wonderful opportunity to just start something new, start something creative, do something that has nothing to do with recovering from this injury and start feeling back in the driving seat of being of service and being able to attend to other people's concerns and needs, rather than being overwhelmed by the physical and emotional and mental concerns and needs that I had as a result of the accident. So if any of your listeners are thinking about careers, career direction, making a change, I'd love it if they checked out the Career Equation podcast.
Speaker 3Is there a website as?
Speaker 1well, there is. So the website is thecareerequationcom. And, yeah, if they want to find out more about how to work with me or, you know, as an organization to work with us, thecareerequationcom will answer all of those questions, as well as all the places you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3That's great. That's exciting. I hope the podcast is a huge success. I'm sure it will be.
Speaker 1Thank you very much. I really appreciate your support and the chance to talk about it really, because it's been quite a journey and I don't really talk about it that much. So if it's been useful for anyone and if they want to get in touch, you can find me on LinkedIn or via the website. I would always love to hear from you and be useful in any way that I can.
Speaker 3Perfect, Erica. Thank you again for joining me on the Bed Back Beyond podcast and if you are a listener that has a positive story of recovery from a serious neck or back injury, head over to bedbackbeyondcom and click share your story. I'd love to include your voice on the show. Again, Erica, thank you so much. My pleasure, Thank you for having me.