The Stranger Inside Me

Then the car accident happened and shattered my world. Suddenly the soundtrack changed.

What began as pain turned into surgeries and more pain. Major back surgeries. Nerve injuries. Oxycodone. Percocet. Dilaudid. “Just for a month,” they said.

I left the hospital and got handed back to my primary. That’s when the scripts started to stack. The surgery hadn't worked as well as was hoped. Pills were a constantly changing cocktail:

One for pain. Another for pain.

One for muscle spasms.

One for nerve damage.

One to help me sleep.

One for the creeping anxiety and the black-cloud depression that came with realizing your body is no longer yours.

It went on for years — another surgery to patch the last, instructions to “stay ahead of the pain,” and a haze that did exactly that: kept me numb.

Weeks blurred into months. I laughed less, loved less, lived less. The girl who danced barefoot on the beach and belted karaoke at the Lighthouse was gone. The woman left behind? I didn’t recognize her.

Yet, I felt well enough to cold turkey myself off of all the drugs when I found out I was pregnant with our first baby (come on, who expects that to happen the first try? I grinned and suffered through the pain - knowing that there was a blessing at the end of the darkness. I even thought I could delivery her naturally - another bad idea. I wasn't strong enough, put us both in danger and destroyed my already delicate back. Fun fact? My Dr. Feel Good was Einstein's great grandson!

This all to say....

The fallout isn’t always tabloid drama. It’s quieter and more poisonous. It's secret. It's painful. I was exceptionally good at wearing the mask.

It turns into the mom who misses kiddo events because she’s fogged out.

The friend who fades away from shame of not being enough. Afraid of the hug they'd give me if they knew the personal hell I was in.

The years you lose while you survive instead of live.

And sometimes it’s loud — like your mother finding you unresponsive and everything crashing at once.

I know that place. I was her. I almost didn’t come back.

And that part of the story — the important part of the story, the climb back, the teeth-gritting reclaiming of myself — is coming...I'm still trying to figure out how it all happened, so bear with me. In the meantime - we need to have a conversation about something else.