The Mind's Role In Recovery

When I was 11 years old I was involved in a major car accident... it’s funny how your whole life can change in an instant.

- Laetitia Dee

On that day, while we were standing next to the road waiting for the towing service to arrive I had no way of knowing that the trajectory of my life would experience a tectonic shift because of what had just happened.

From that moment on living with back pain and drinking pain killers became part of my life. While I was still in school I visited the physiotherapist numerous times for treatment, but as I got older these sessions became less effective over time.

In adulthood I became overweight and, in 2006, one of the reasons I wanted to lose weight was to alleviate the chronic back pain I had been living with for nearly a decade. I subsequently lost 30 kilos after completely changing my lifestyle and starting to exercise.

Making these changes and the resultant weight loss provided some relief, at least for a few years, but I was yet to realise the full extent and severity of my back problems. From 2007 to 2014 I lifted incrementally heavier weights and started doing highimpact exercises such as sprints and box jumps. I was, however, completely oblivious to the impact that these choices and behaviours had on my injury and it subsequently got much worse.

By the start of 2016, I had reached a point where nothing worked any more and my symptoms had become progressively more severe. I was experiencing numbness in my left leg, which was an indication of possible nerve impingement, so I went for physiotherapy, cortisone infiltrations and I decreased the amount of exercise I did, all in the hope of alleviating the pain, but nothing worked.