WHEN THE UNIVERSE GIVES ME "NO" - I Hunt For "YES"

I drove all the way out there for nothing.

Twice.

It's almost a half-hour drive to my dentist's office, which is annoying in itself, but when it happened, gas prices were at their highest so... I was NOT thrilled.

It all started three years ago.

July 2019

I go to a new dentist. He is one of the only ones within 20 miles in my network. His office is full of screaming, unchecked children. His schedule is backed up by a half-hour. When I meet him, his smile is too big and too tense, his greeting a little too boisterous.

I do NOT like him.

But we beggars on Medicaid don't get to be choosers and I'm already in the chair. I mean, does anybody really like going to the dentist? He notices that my crown is a little high. It's been this way for twenty years and nobody has ever said anything about it. He offers to take it down a little so I can have more comfort. I am quite excited about this notion, because yeah, it's always been too high, so I agree.

Somewhere in the middle of this process, he informs me that he's had to do all the cleanings this week as well as his normal dentisty-doings because he only has one hygienist and she's on vacation. "Yeah," he laughs. It's a nerdy laugh. I don't mind nerdy because I'm nerdy but his is annoying. (I wonder how annoying mine is to nerds who are not me.) "When she gets back I'll hire a second one."

Um...

Wait a sec.

With my mouth cranked open, to the sounds of buzzing that blurs my vision, I analyze this logic. Your single hygienist went on vacation, not an emergency leave of absence. Vacations are planned and approved in advance. So you knew she'd be gone, but you're going to hire a second one AFTER she gets back?

My eyes narrow. My brows furrow up in distaste. My ears flatten. I do this all in my head while brightening my eyes and plastering on the "oh, interesting" face in time with my "oh, I see" noise from the back of my throat.

Now I REALLY do not like him.

I cannot vacate this office quickly enough. I vow I will never go back and pray that my other two in-network options are better.

Two weeks later, I notice that my crown has developed a chip in it. Medicaid pays for nothing to do with crowns. No. Thing.

FutherMuckingFeatherPluckingNastyToeSucking HELLS.

I set about attempting to save the money to pay for a new crown. In the meanwhile, miniature slivers of crown continue chipping off my tooth...

September 2019

I'm watching a movie and eating crackers with hummus. I chew another cracker.

CRHHHRRUNCH!

A huge chuck cracks off my crown. I still do not have the money to pay for a new one. But I have no pain or even any sensitivity to heat or cold so...I wait.

Inhaaaaaaaaaale...heavy exhale.

Can you see how flat my ears are as I type this?

November 2019

For the first time, I experience a slight siiiing while eating ice cream. Crap. I can't wait any longer. I call my dentist and start the procedure to get a new crown on one of those medical emergency credit cards. Disabled girls on Medicaid don't get to have those, so my mother has to sign for it. Joy-joy. I continue trying to save money to eventually pay it off.

Medicaid, however, will kindly put a hole in my face! Thanks! They pay for the yoinking of my old crown. This sucker would have probably lasted the rest of my life and survived a nuclear blast that vaporized my skeleton. My new dentist--a friendly, snappy, super put-together young guy--has to cut this sucker into three pieces in order to finally, with copious apologies, pry it from my skull.

I like him much better and am relieved to be in his hands for the rest of this adventure.

He is absolutely horrified by the level of infection that he has to address. "You...you haven't been in awful pain?" he asks.

I shrug, cringe-grin, and tell him no. Just a little zinging in the last week and the first sensitivity to hot yesterday. This is actually no surprise to me. I live with so much pain in that general vicinity all the time, so I'm sure it was just one more cricket legging among the chorus.

Alas. This is one of the detriments to having a high tolerance for certain types of pain. You just don't friggin' notice. (This simultaneously gives me hypersensitivity to other unfamiliar types of pain because my system does NOT wanna deal with one more blasted cricket!)

I digress.

We do a bone graft. I leave to let it grow. Woot.

Since I am a diligent believer in mind-over-matter, I help my body along by envisioning lots of happy bone growing in my mouth. While my body is at it, I ask it to please consider using this sweet new skill to fill in some pockmarks that my cervical vertebrae have developed from grinding on each other for the past two decades of having a reverse-curve in my neck.

I mean, what's it gonna hurt? The inspiration to do more meditation? Awww, darn. Count that as a small YES among all the NO.

Winter/Spring 2020

While I finish growing enough bone to put in a tooth implant, life decides to laugh at all we piddly humans. Bwahahahaha!!!!! Enjoy some Plague, suckahhhhhs!

I lose the little bit of income I'd managed to hold onto with the few broken claws I have left after my 2nd-4th brain traumas. Fortuitously, my parents receive stimulus checks and graciously, blessedly, lovingly offer to pay for my dental surgery, so that I can put all my stimulus money into paying off the spinal rehab that's been undoing my 20 years of ever-worsening scoliosis caused by my big car wreck. This new chiropractic adventure has also been miraculously restoring my neck curve, which prevents my seizures. (1) Gotta love that!

Being able to drop those two chunks of money onto my credit cards bumps my interest payment back down to a level that allows me to continue seeing my chiropractor instead of declaring bankruptcy, because disabled girls who barely make any money to begin with don't get unemployment or Covid bail-out when we lose our teensy bit of income.

Then Covid, with its astronomical ass-reaming of NO, gives me another unexpected gift of YES. Amidst Plague, the world miraculously figures out that low-income people on disability might actually require mental health services like trauma therapy, just like rich people who can pay for it themselves. Noooooo...

YES!

For the first time since we began hunting for help in third grade, I sit down with a therapist who has techniques that can actually DO something about all my PTSD-tangled neurons that I've had since before kindergarten. That caliber of stress-reduction and the increase in brain functionality never hurts anybody's other health maladies so...bonus! Although EMDR (2) is hard work and exhausting, all of my healing in general takes a nice little upward swing.

In the meanwhile, I do my job like a good little bone-grower. My dentist sends me to an oral surgeon who installs a tooth implant. He, too, has a smile that is too big for the situation, but he is super efficient so I let that slide. Especially since I'm only conscious for about half-a-minute after he enters the room. Like I said, highly efficient.

I'm a fan of efficiency. Especially when it leaves me no room to get nervous about surgery.

Summer 2020 - Spring 2021

Due to the level of infection I began this adventure with, the implant never fully heals. I never experience more than a few pain-free days at the site and I quickly develop a horrific throat infection, just south of that tooth. Strange red spiderwebs spread across the back of my throat.

Simultaneously, my body scent changes and I develop huge, painful boils on my back and in other...innnnteresting places. Places that oral surgeons apparently don't like to talk about. Since he can't see any infection around where my gums specifically hurt, his coded questions and comments inform me that he thinks I've been sucking the wrong dick.

Now, since I haven't been sucking any dicks for quite some time at this point, and have been tested for STIs because I didn't trust the last dick I had in my bed, I know this is false.

He assures me that the surgery and my maladies cannot possibly be related.

Hahahahahaha...

I know my body really well, and I assure myself that he is incorrect. You see, he is a stereotypical male, highfalutin surgeon (which his female office staff subtly confirm), and I am a 50 year old female, therefore, he diagnoses me with "hysterical female syndrome." Since I have been diagnosed with this condition more times than he's taken a crap, I schedule an appointment with my primary care physician.

Since we're still at the height of the pandemic, my doctor refuses to swab my throat. He barely looks at it. He just throws me on antibiotics and gets me out as quickly as he can.

The antibiotics tame the infections. For awhile. They come back. I tell everybody. Nobody will swab my throat. Nobody will take a blood sample. Nobody will believe me that it's a very simple thing:

• My implant site becomes sensitive, then swollen and painful.

• That same pocket in my throat fills with pus. Again.

• Red spiderwebs shoot out from the pus pocket across the back of my throat.

• Fatigue and full body aches strike.

• My body's general scent changes.

• Nasty boils form--in the exact same place every single time.

My oral surgeon would really like to clear me for a crown because the implant itself is solid, but alas, I keep complaining that there is significant pain around the site of it. But he can't see any infection on the outside and nothing is showing up in the x-rays.

But I KNOW.

I fire my primary care physician. I get a new one. He's worse than the first, so I fire him too and wind up with a lovely female, about my age, also athletic with injuries, who is chock full of a gazillion awesome suggestions about all sorts of bodily maladies that have plagued me for decades.

Well, there's a YESSSSSS for ya, rising up out of a great big steaming pile o' NO.

At long last, on my third trip back to my oral surgeon, he manages to see what I've been talking about for months. "Ohhh, yeah, there's some infection here. There's just not enough room for this implant because of the size of the baby tooth next to it."

Yes. You heard that correctly. Until this time, I'd had three baby teeth still in my mouth because the adult versions never formed. These tenacious little weeds have been clinging to my jaws on the barest shreds of roots for over twenty years. "Wow, I can't believe you still have these!" dentist after dentist has said.

But c'mon. These are my teeth. I am the human equivalent of bindweed so...

So this baby tooth has to come out. Did you know that Tooth 13's baby version is wider than its adult version? I didn't. Well, it is. Hence why I had no room at the inn, and why my gums kept getting pinched by that implant and thus remained incapable of healing. But nobody listens to the professional athlete whose mind-body connection is a finely tuned instrument. Noooope.

Motherfucking helllllllls, you didn't know there wouldn't be enough room before you shoved the thing into my face?!

Well, my surgeon manages to beg a charity implant from the producers of such things because disabled girls on Medicaid occasionally tug on heartstrings. For all my trouble, pain, anesthesia and suffering, he also offers to do the installation of this second implant for free.

Whew!!! ✨🙏✨

The paranoid part of my brain wonders if he gets a kickback from something in this procedure because that original implant was set at a weird angle, slanted toward the baby tooth. But with all the freebies I can't think of what benefit he might gain, so I roll my eyes, heave my umpteenth sigh, and get ready to chant my mantra that I developed through car wreck injury and physical therapy: "It's only pain. It's only pain. It's only pain."

Grudgingly, I give the green-light to two more surgeries. Out comes the trouble-implant. Out comes the baby tooth. In goes another bone graft as well as a second implant because the area of the baby tooth had enough of a base to install it. Woot.

Apparently I'm kinda funny whenever they put me out. It has become old hat by now. I used to be horrifically needle-phobic. Yeahhhhh, I've pretty much gotten over that. I'm still a control-freak about it but...eh. I also make the whole team laugh while they put the IV in and then hit the plunger. I feel The Black coming on. "Oooookay, bye now. See y'all on the other--"

ZZZZZ...

I'm also apparently quite entertaining as I'm coming out of it.

Portrait of a Smartass Without Pain

This is SOP for me. I was an all-singing, all-snarking dinner-and-a-show to the paramedics who hauled me out of my crumpled car in half a belly dancer outfit and a leopard-trimmed coat, and you can always tell when I've gone into shock. I laugh, sometimes hysterically, and crack jokes like I'm on Comedy Central.

So no shit, there we were, steering my weeble-wobbly ass down the tilted hallways for the second time. They pour me into my mom's car. She stops to get me ice cream, as has become The Tradition. I prefer Neapolitan for this ritual because I'm a Sag, I do not have favorites, and I want it all while I'm recovering from surgery.

See, this is another example of that YES I'm always hunting for. Ice cream (that does not customarily live in my house because sugar and my system are not nice playmates, but sugar and my tongue have a hot, melty love affair). Expensive juices I usually can't afford (except when I'm not buying food of any substance except smoothie fixins and soups...) The excuse to subsist on creamy chicken ramen and mac-and-cheese once I can gum soft foods (because I must counterbalance the sweet with the salty, duh). Did I mention the ice cream?

YESSSSSS...

October 2021

I have learned to grow bone as deftly as a sixteen-year-old boy. Eventually we repeat this process, ice cream, hilarious shenanigans, and all after he shoves the old implant back into my face. More recovery ensues.

Except the implant never fully heals. All those nasty symptoms come right back - symptoms that immediately ceased the moment he took that first implant out.

But my tooth and my full-body infection aren't related at all, nooooooo.

November 2021

Since we really do not want to admit defeat and abandon this implant site for all time, we try one more different type of antibiotic. I learn later that they customarily administer this stuff via IV in places like the ICU. It has some innnnnteresting side effects, some of which are neurological and quite scary.

On day six-of-seven I start experiencing little flickers of them. I consider not taking that last day's doses, but the symptoms go away. I tentatively take the morning pill. Nothing. I take the last one.

Miraculously, I haven't had a throat infection or boil since, and the implant site finally healed. Slowly. But surely. So that antibiotic did its job.

FFS.

Alas, the customary gastrointestinal shenanigans that ensue with friggin' antibiotics are on steroids with this thing, but eventually I get them under control, too. Gah.

Now here's the strange thing. Remember when I said I had some weird neuro symptoms? Some of them were very similar to when I did a major parasite cleanse and it worked on stuff in my brain. Parasites are common to someone who swims in lakes and rivers, has friends with dogs and kids, etc. I mean, c'mon. We de-worm our pets all the time, yet we snuggle up with them so why wouldn't this be a normal thing to address?

So I did, and oh, was I glad! Apparently parasites especially like things like injury sites and can become a Catch-22. They eat nasties, they breed and poop, which creates more toxicity around an already troublesome site, which gives them more to eat. More poop. More fodder. More breeding...etc.

So around Day 4 of this antibiotic I had a massive headache centralized around that spot at my right occipital bone--you know, where my cerebrospinal fluid used to back up and give me seizures. The same spot that, during the Seizure Years, turned all the hair above it an ugly, wiry iron-gray that didn't even like to take bleach. (It went mostly away when the seizures stopped.)

This headache was really familiar. It felt like the die-off headache during that parasite cleanse. Not the big, generalized one that I had for the first week, but the localized "somebody just put the back of my skull into a vice-grip--oh shit, now it's squeezing my frontal lobe--crap! It's about to pop out my left eyeball through my temple!"

It was that kind of pain, in the same spots (all my most significant TBI areas), and it lasted for half a day.

Do you remember what happened at the end of November and into December?

Out of nowhere, with no changes to my cognitive routines, I got back the ability to pleasure read. I bombed through 250K and 400K intricate novels with full reading comprehension that I haven't had since I got punched in the face and developed chronic seizures.

I simultaneously got back the ability to choreograph. These require similar skills of concentrated sequencing (reading the page in order and comprehending it vs. putting the right move in the right order to the right time in the song) and sequenced memory recall after I've slept. These are the primary issues I have in both of these activities.

And suddenly, I can do them both again.

Fascinating...

May 2022

Over the course of the winter and into spring, I become a reading, choreographing, costume-sewing fiend. Alas, the last time I was capable of creating choreographies was many years before I tore my meniscus. There's a rhythm with choreography, especially when you're getting to the end of the song. You're almost there. It's the finale. Just a tiny bit more and you'll be finished. Plus you're in The Zone and you want to continue this train of thought because if you stop now, you might lose this flavor, this theme, this mood, this momentum. Trying to get it back can be really difficult. Especially with Dain Bramage.

So you push through.

Unless you're like me and have certain knee injuries that cannot take losing the muscle support around it. You know, like the support one loses when one's legs become fatigued because you've been bouncing on them for two hours straight?

FUCK FUCK FUCK.

Yes. I re-tore my meniscus while trying to finish the big finale of a footwork-heavy dance. First off, this informed me that doing the move I was attempting to put in there can no longer be in my arsenal until they develop meniscus transplants for disabled girls on Medicaid.

Second, I must now alter the choreographic rhythms I've had since I was twelve years old.

If legs fatigue, that's it. Even if I lose the momentum for that day. Even if I never finish the dance because I lost the momentum. It's much better to lose that than to be put back on my ass for multiple months while I have to re-heal a tear.

Now here's where things get interesting.

By some strange coincidence, I acquired this injury almost three years to the day from when I had that big calamitous injury where I couldn't walk for a week. I had almost given myself meniscus surgery. It wasn't a straight tear. It was an L-shape that nearly carved a chunk out of it. I decided not to have surgery right then, but to see if I could heal it myself, because surgery would create a significant instability in the knee forever. Not my idea of fun.

That sucker took a year-and-a-half before I could start dancing in only the compression brace, not the compression plus the huge support brace. But it happened. Slowly. And surely.

So, like always with this injury, I went in to see my sports medicine chiropractor. After hearing that I regularly take glucosamine/MSM/condroitin, he was really surprised that I'd re-injured it like that, so he suggested that I get the triple-strength and bombard my body with the highest dose.

Okay, cool.

I did. When I went to compare the labels with what I'd been taking, I realized something awful. I had inherited a ginormous bottle from a friend who moved overseas and I had been working my way through most of it for the past nine months.

Nine months of ONLY glucosamine.

No MSM, which is what my injuries need the most.

RazzaFrazzaFrukkaFrikkaSupercalifraggaFUCK!

Fiiiiiiiiine.

So I prepared to snarf copious probiotics and fiber, and I got myself a little extra help to combat the G/M/C-bomb that would undoubtedly stop up the slooooooow system I've already inherited. My sports med doc informed me that, in order to get these supplements past the nutrient-gobblers of my spine so my knee could benefit, I would have to take as much as possibly recommended.

Which means, on an average dose, my knee has been getting very little of the supplement I've been taking for years. Over the past nine months with only the glucosamine, no doubt it's been receiving zilch because...well, we know what's up with my spine.

While I was at it, I also started using the therapy lights again, doing heavy meditation on this injury, and I ordered a bottle of the Melissa oil because that was the magic combo last time I went from not being able to walk to running up a mountain in one month.

Within weeks, I could feel the difference. Within a month, I could reeeeeally feel the difference.

Especially in my neck.

May-June 2022

It starts with the ability to turn my head more when I drive. Then it progresses to shoulder flexibility I haven't had in years. Next comes the miracle day.

A vertebra that we never adjust...like, I don't know if we've ever actually adjusted my C4 and if so, it's been years. But here's the weird thing.

He pushes it straight in!!!!

We never push my neck straight in. It's always either that somebody's torqued off and twisted around, or popped out to the side. Usually both.

But he pushes that vertebra straight forward.

As in...pushing the center of my neck toward its natural cervical curve. As in...I think we just crested this mountain I've been hacking and clawing and slogging and backsliding and hacking and barreling and trudging up for 22 years. At long last, we're over the hump of developing a straight neck--which, let me assure you, SUCKS to have--and we're finally restoring the actual curve I was born with.

Ohhhhhh can I tell the difference!

Right after that, I get back hip and ribcage range of motion--painless range of motion--that I haven't had since before 2010. Now granted, having to barrel up to Minnesota for my uncle's funeral, driving 30 hours in four days and doing almost nothing but sitting between drives, plus a crappy hotel bed...that put a detour into the whole thing. But I've been reclaiming the progress since we got back.

To top off the month's celebration, it is determined that I am ready for crowns, so we do the molds as well as the year's cleaning. (Medicaid has decided in the last few years that disabled people only need their teeth cleaned once a year because...I dunno. We're special and the recommended bi-annual norm for preventative maintenance doesn't apply to us? But hey. At least they help us get one cleaning!)

Two weeks later, I return for my crowns, wagging full-body in the excitement of finally having this adventure over. But the office is baffled at my arrival. I am not on the books.

Umph. Because that appointment was my annual cleaning that I forgot to remove from my calendar when we lumped it in with the crown molds. Okay, no problemo. I was a dork, so I flash a cute-but-dumb smile and head home.

A week later, I have to reschedule my crown installation because they haven't gotten them in yet--delivery problems, don'tcha know? Okay. Sigh. No problemo. I drive in at the rescheduled time.

And I am not on the books.

A-flippin-gain.

Because the person who had entered my rescheduled appointment was not the person who normally schedules appointments and she'd forgotten to hit SAVE. Oooookay. Wooooo-sahhhhhh. Growling through gritted teeth: No problemo. Gas is only at its highest and this month I've had to rearrange my finances, trading out a bunch of my gas budget for also-ridiculously high food prices but...well...

What can ya do?

Make lemonade. We make a lot of lemonade around here. Good thing I like Arnold Palmers.

Since I was almost all the way out on the edge of town, I decide not to let the gas guzzle be a wasted expenditure. I take myself into the woods to a lake I have never really explored--mostly because it's out in BFE and that's an expensive trip on my budget. While I am there, walking and walking and walking, listening for where the Muse says, "Go on this trail, not that one," and "No, don't go over there, go here," some things occur to me.

Things about my knee, my spine, my brain, and the Muse that had not occurred to me in the feeding frenzy of the past three years' snafus. Things that inspired this whole post.

This happens to me a lot. The two biggest inspirations for these types of big-picture revelations are putting one foot in front of the other out in nature while I'm alone in silence, and performing repetitive, routine maintenance tasks like cleaning, weeding, painting, snow shoveling.

BWONG.

Things come clear.

July 2022

So at long last, after a gazillion scheduling issues and more delayed delivery of my crowns, I finally get the holes filled in my face from 3 years of dental hell.

While eating some super-sweet cantaloupe and pizza as a reward, I realize that I don't flippin' know how to eat on that side of my mouth anymore. Hahahaha! But hopefully we have the crowns ground down correctly this time and that'll be that.

So then some music comes on that lures me into the dance studio. I put on the knee braces. I warm up. And for the first time in over two months, I dance full out! Yes, with carefully curated vocabulary, but I truly and fully dance. Extra bonus: I had just gotten back slow three-step-turns a few days before. I could also slowly spin to the right again.

And do you know what's been happening in the past months of injury recovery? I've had the music for this ginormous dance project on constant play, which means I know it inside and out now in a way I didn't when I thought I was one week out from filming. I've had time to mentally work with the choreographies which means that by the time I return to them, I'll know them so much better than right after I created them--which means they'll probably be better for the tweaking, but I also won't have to do so many takes because I'll know them better. Fewer takes means less energy and less fatigue which means less risk of injury.

Woot on about three different levels.

TODAY

I have started going back through my Elements System in order to put my vocabulary and improvisational chops back into muscle memory and active neuron pathways. Of course, we start at Earth, which means foundation, grounding, stability, alignment, strength. We have to rebuild these things from the ground up--badum-tssss.

This Standard Operating Procedure has sparked another project that was long overdue. When I overhauled my website, changing it from the advertisement of the Arts I Make into the home of the arts themselves, I basically turned my home page into a big rainbow-hued Jackson Pollock splatter of AllTheThings, just so I could have them in one place. I knew I would eventually organize it and give each element/realm/modality its own portal.

Well, playing with The System in the manner for which it was created--my own personal healing and dance enrichment--has given me another BWONG on the head. "NOW. Go here. Do this." Oooookay...so I've been organizing the splatterific mess of the website, which will finally encourage me to...gee...I dunno...actually share it with people without wanting to tack up a sign that says, "Sorry for the mess!" Hahahah!

That will be coming up in the very new future.

As for the spine progress, just two days ago, I woke up in the middle of the night to my neck muscles stretching my cervical vertebrae vertically--putting more space between them, and voila! Last night, my neck lacked the big bump I've had back there for two decades. My spine was nearly smooth again! It comes and goes; mostly it stays. But not lately. In the past two weeks, my body has also been hard at work undoing the sharp jag my vertebrae took around all that scar tissue in my center-back.

It's truly moving. It's changing.

Go figure...I've been doing a lot of heart-chakra work as well so...yeah. As I covered in that big Avatar post, where the mind goes, so goes the body, and vs. versa.

Am I still pissy about a negligent, incompetent dentist chipping my tooth and setting me on the 3-year road of bullshit? YUP.

Am I still aggravated about being slapped with such a long stint of hysterical female syndrome and not being listened to by multiple doctors? YUP.

Am I still frustrated about being reinjured and having to put my dance project on the shelf, just when I was experiencing dance-obsession for the first time in a decade? Of course. I look at that rack of costumes at least twice a day and it aches. The lure of doing the project is starting to fade after having to dangle it on the precipice for so many months.

Now that I've started to dance full-out again, I have to be careful not to push--especially at this precarious moment. This is probably the most dangerous time of them all. Possibly even more dangerous than an actual filming day.

Slow. And steady. Slow. And steady. Patience, grasshopper.

Yet in all these aggravations, through all these detours I wish I didn't have to take, through all that frustration and pain...I constantly feel the nibbling of the larger scope. A nudge here. A tweak there. And the questions that accompany it each time.

Will my dances actually turn out better than they would have without this detour?

Did that whole dental fiasco and this knee injury accelerate my spinal and neurological healing?

And what new trajectory has all of that pushed me into?

I try not to look at those very much. I just glance and wonder. Mostly, I let it help ease my frustration over all this shitstorm of NO by wondering how many of them were actually a sneaky-deaky YES in disguise.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

--UP NEXT: That day I went to the lake hunting for "YES" and had all these revelations

--OR: I've written a bunch of other tales about the PRACTICAL MAGIC OF HEALING from brain and bodily injury

--THE NAVIGATION TABLE OF CONTENTS

SOME HANDY LINKS

1) I don't do rack-n-crack chiropractic anymore. I go to a neuro-chiropractor who uses a device called The Integrator and it has made all the difference.

2) Trauma & EMDR

—One of the best books I have ever read in my life: The Body Keeps the Score - Brain, Mind & Body in the Healing of Trauma

—Don't want to read the book? Here's the basic premise of what trauma does to the body and why talking about it, even in therapy, so often doesn't solve the problems: Short Version. Or Long Version by the author himself

—A few of the myriad healing techniques discussed in the book: EMDR, Yoga, Mindfulness & Support Network. These are only a few the book covers.

—EMDR: The technique that has given me the most success, both for immediate single-incident trauma (my big car wreck) and for C-PTSD.