Clueless

December 5, 2022

February of 2003 saw me down in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I had just picked up a load of fabric, 24 skids of it that weighed about 3,000 lbs. I was unhappy about that, I was too light considering that they were forecasting a nasty winter storm that I would run in to as I got back to Ontario. As I did, I seemed to have missed the major amounts of accumulation, what I got instead were roads that were wet and then quick froze.

 Due to the road conditions, I was being cautious travelling along at about 60 kph, and everyone and his uncle was flying by me. I let them go certain that I would see most of them on their sides in the ditch by the time I got to Toronto. As I got to the 88 km marker on the west side of the railway bridge, a truck broke traction while passing me in the left lane and slid halfway into my right hand lane colliding with my truck which forced me off the road and resulted with my truck rolling over due to the steepness of the embankment.

That I did not get squished by the initial collision was thanks to me at least seeing him coming at me, I have no conscious memory of ripping my seat-belt off, and leaping out of the driver’s seat and over to the passenger seat, where I ended up rolling up onto my shoulders as the truck rolled and slid to stop and covered me in broken glass from the windshield breaking. I had some nasty cuts and abrasions but that seemed to be the worst of it, at least at first. My back injury started as a dull ache while there at the wreck, and quickly grew to agonizing. I and my doctors thought that it was just bruised or strained and would likely heal on its own, nope, 10 years of agony awaited me. I went thru all manner of rehab efforts, all of which proved useless, I suffered with the use of regular pain relievers, I was scared of opiates, plus I wanted a fix for the problem not a mask for it.

Along comes 2013 and one night I am sat at the computer, and I am almost weeping from the pain I am in, and I am searching for some type of non-medicinal pain reliever, and I find this obscure reference to pain relief for horses. The stuff was called DMSO, and as I researched it, it was as scary as it was promising. Being desperate, despite the risks, I used it and over the course of six months, using it every other day, I healed completely. I even use it occasionally internally to do a deep detox. Make no mistake, the stuff is dangerous, and I am not  advocating for you to use it, this was/is a personal choice and is used with an abundance of caution.

This then was an incident where the Universe is saying to me, “Christopher, you have not learned anything, now we are going to play hardball”. Up until that moment in time I really had believed that my dad had been right, he had called me the toughest Son of a Bitch that he had ever met, and I felt like  it. I was hard, cold, and I feared nothing. There was nothing that anyone could do to me that had not been done before and it was all Ho-Hum. I was dead inside emotionally, I felt no physical pain, and I had incredible tolerance and stamina to it because I had spent my life having the snot kicked out of me. Pain was nothing. Here though the Universe upped the ante, it forced a situation on me where I should have been scared shitless for my life, getting crushed by a 40 ton vehicle and seeing it come at me as it killed me. I do not remember feeling even an instant of fear even as it happened, or even as when I climbed out of the wreck, and stood on the driver’s door because it had rolled on the passenger side, 10 feet above the ground, and jumped down to the ground because there was no  safe way of climbing down. The only thing I can remember thinking about was, “How in fucks name was I going to explain this to the boss?” It helped a lot that they found the driver who hit me an hour down the road at the Flying J in London, Ontario nose parked trying to hide the damage to his truck.

Here we see my ego in complete control, I have no fear, I feel no pain, I can move past this like it is just another day at the park, I am in complete control even to the point where my job should not be in jeopardy because I did not cause the accident. It was all about my agenda, doing what I had spent a lifetime doing, forcing myself to not feel anything, suppressing the fear, the relief, the trippy feeling that I had that I had jumped off a rolled over transport truck and had remembered to grab my coat before exiting the vehicle. I had it together. Here, the Universe is looking at me and my life lesson, and it was not happy with me at all. Things to that point had always been about me, I will tough out the bullying, I will tough out my mother rejecting me, I will tough out the dramas that the whore with the caving expeditions brought, I will somehow tough out the Nanny’s unbelievably bad choices. It had always been about me getting through it, without care, without thought, without ability to temper anything I did or thought.

All of the bad stuff that had taken place to that point had been about breaking my ego, and I had not seen it that way at all. Instead of humbling myself it had everyday been a case of, these people are ass-holes, and I will take their shit, and deal with it, because I am unbreakable. So by the night of the accident, the Universe was sick of my shit, and was about to prove to me that, I was indeed breakable. Up until that point I thought I knew what pain was, and I knew that it could be controlled, but that was external pain, and a mindset. This injury was different, it was self –  generating, hyper nerve stimulation which resulted in muscle activation and continuous spasming. I maintained the idea that it was only pain and that it could be controlled, only to discover that at this level, it could not. There were a variety of factors that eventually led to feelings of hopelessness, a feeling that I had never before experienced. But here even still, my ego was at work, I will tough this out, I will find a fix for this, I am unbreakable.

Here the Universe had hit a game tying home run, my mental/emotional energies were low because I spent a lot of energy fighting the pain, and as a result, other aspects of the Universe’s pincer attack were able to move forward and do what I mistakenly thought initially, great harm. On the home front there was little or no support from the Leprechaun, my injury was preventing her having that narcissistic power and control, and she resented that, and in no uncertain terms let me know that. Her miserable behaviours on a daily basis tripled at least. I was made to feel guilty for being injured, like it was my fault. How she justified that to herself, I will never understand, especially after she saw the pictures of the damage done to my truck. That I was not squashed like a bug by the initial collision or by the engine coming thru the fire wall and coming to rest about an inch and a half from my hip was designed to force fear into me, and crazily, it did not.

At the time, I had no understanding of the purpose of why I needed to suffer; my only understanding was of some vaguely understood concept of memories from a previous life. I accepted that these “memories” implied that there would be a series of serious accidents, none of which would cause me catastrophic harm, but nonetheless would be responsible for serious changes in me. This one I knew from the instant it took place was the first, and from then, I was cautiously certain that there was something in my future that was going to be bad. At the time there was a sickening certainty to it, but as time passed, I began to doubt that certainty, and tried to brush it aside as understandable nerves brought about by the previous wreck. Part of the problem with that was, the impression given me by these memories was that these incidents would take place fairly close together.

What I was not considering was, the span of our lives, and what the lessons are during our lifetimes.

 We each need time to learn and then time to process the lesson, and then we need to write the exam showing that we have learned the lesson, this we do by our changed behaviours. Me, I flunked that exam because my behaviour did not change, at least not enough. I needed an 85% to pass and I got like  an 82%. This of course set up the event of 2008, where a young woman on her way to an interview at U of T got herself decapitated underneath my truck by losing control of her car while passing me on a beautiful sunny early morning in February. That trauma, plus some extremely personal traumas taking place in the five years between, resulted in a diagnosis of PTSD. The resultant unravelling of my life and the physical agony of the still unhealed back injury led to a type of hell that I would wish on no one. (Well I have 7 people for sure that I would wish it on and much worse, I have a gasoline enema prepared for one in particular).

The best that I can describe PTSD as, is a 3rd degree burn to 90% of your emotional track. It is truly a debilitating condition.

 For you naysayers, I personally challenge you to come through it with your life intact, even if you are capable of  living through it.

This second accident was  the expected one, and it did indeed cause major changes in me. But even still, my attitude throughout had been about I will recover, I am tough enough to get through this. I was still somewhat symptomatic come 2015, and come February 2016, the  Universe pulled the rug out from under me completely. Through 50 years of trying it finally achieved its purpose, it broke me. And it left me to stew in it for almost two years until it handed me the people that I needed to begin to rebuild who I was, this time properly, with love, compassion, affirmation, and most importantly of all, with respect.