I've begun to believe in medical karma. Essentially, it's a what-goes-around-comes-around-in-casualty philosophy, the central tenet of which is that if you mock someone else 's affliction, you will end up a sufferer yourself. It sounds far-fetched, but my brush with whiplash after a car crash last year has made me a firm believer.
I've never given any credence to whiplash. In trying to make money out of pretending to be ill, the 'victims' of whiplash always seemed to hover in my moral universe somewhere around people who burn their carpet on purpose to scam the insurance companies.
They say there 's nothing like a near-death experience to make you reassess your principles, though, and a high-speed motorway collision in Arizona last year hurled me headlong into a whole world of pain, where the only explanation for my suffering was that I was being punished for being so horrible about other people's misfortunes.
At first, it seemed as if I 'd had a lucky escape. All four of us were wearing seatbelts, so I escaped being 'tossed out the top of the car like a Barbie doll', as a firefighter who arrived on the scene gently put it. Shaking in the desert heat, I counted my injuries and my blessings by the side of the road: a bleeding tongue (I had bitten it when we hit), a bruise on my shin, and a pair of Loewe sunglasses that would never be the same again. Oh, and a sore neck. But hey, it was only a sore neck - I could be dead, for God 's sake. A couple of ambulance men checked us over, told us we didn 't need to go to hospital, and sent me on my way with an ice pack for my neck.
It stayed sore for the rest of my holiday, so I went to my GP when I came home. 'You probably have a bit of whiplash,' she said. 'It's like a sprain in your neck.' The sprain happens because the head snaps back and forth very quickly when the car crashes - like a whip - so the neck muscles are stretched massively before they quickly contract again. The ligaments that join up all the tiny joints in the neck experience the same thing. This woman shared my own robust attitude to 'whiplash', it seemed, and announced it would go away in a while. Still more upset at this point about the Loewe sunglasses, I went about my business for the next few weeks, ignoring the odd twinge and a good deal of stiffness.
The length of time between twinges, however, became shorter and shorter, until I was in low- level pain most of the time, which rose to eye-watering levels for hours afterwards if I put my neck under any kind of duress. 'Duress ' included activities such as titling my head back to put on mascara, or turning sideways to talk to someone.
I started to see a physiotherapist. She explained my neck was in spasm and that she had to manipulate it to relieve it. It sounded credible enough, so I paid £40 a throw for what was essentially massage with a medical veneer twice a week for nearly six weeks. I got no better.
I didn 't know this at the time, but my whiplashed neck was going through a very complicated chain of events. The structures in our necks have more nerves than other parts of our bodies. They get stimulated as a result of the injury, sending pain messages to the brain. Because of this, and because the nerves are traumatised, the muscles tighten, trying to clamp on to the nerves to stop the movement that's causing the pain. To make things worse, explains David Joyce of the Marylebone Physiotherapy and Sports Medicine Clinic (also known as the person who gave me my life back, but more of that later), the deep core muscles in the neck just switch off.' As a reaction to the trauma,' he says, 'they lose their co-ordination and their ability to contract. They 're supposed to come on before we move our arm or our head, to give us a stable base.' When they switch off, we don 't have that base any more, causing extra movement in the vertebrae. In the next step of this 'cascade effect', the surrounding muscles, which are already in spasm trying to stop the nerves from moving, tighten even further to make up for the missing stability in the core muscles. In effect, my neck had itself in a vice-like grip, and it wasn't letting go.
Very little of this trauma shows up during diagnostic tests. An Australian study which involved autopsies on 200 people who had been in car crashes - some of whom had committed suicide because of the pain from their whiplash - revealed massive injury to the neck tissue that an MRI or an X-ray would not pick up. This lack of visible evidence contributes to a culture that can denounce whiplash as psychosomatic or as a litigious ploy.
Two months after the accident, my neck was dominating my every waking moment. Get up in the morning. Ow. Ow. Get into shower. Ow. Avoid washing hair because the slight movements during lathering are much too painful. Skip breakfast because I 've overslept due to near-sleepless night. Go into work and sit at the computer, trying to concentrate while the serpent of pain coils itself around my neck. When someone calls my name, rotate entire body from the waist up to avoid turning my head. Earn the nickname Robocop as a result.
I began to avoid going out because it was too painful to sit down or stand around, but lying on my bed didn't bring much relief either. It came to a head one day when a colleague casually enquired, 'How 's your neck?', causing me to burst into tears and my boss to send me home in a taxi.
As luck would have it, I had an appointment with an orthopaedic doctor the next day for something unrelated . Out of sheer desperation (GP visits having yielded nothing but codeine tablets), I asked him to examine my neck as well. The saintly man took a look at the rings around my eyes and ordered an X-ray. It showed that the natural curve we all have in our cervical spine was pointing in the wrong direction. It 's supposed to curve gently towards the front of our necks, but the muscles in my neck were in such severe spasm, they had pulled all of the vertebrae backwards. 'You must be in a lot of pain,' the nice doctor said. If I had been able to move, I would have hugged him. There was something tangible wrong, it was visible on an X-ray and I wasn't, in fact, going out of my mind.
He referred me to the hospital physiotherapy department, where David Joyce not only began to work on my neck, but on the mindset caused by the pain. 'People become really frightened of the pain,' he says. 'It begins to dominate their whole life, and part of my job is to get their confidence back.' So not only did he teach me exercises to re-awaken the core muscles, but he made sure. I was no longer afraid of moving my head.
Terrified of being left with the pain forever, I did the exercises religiously, as well as continuing to see David for some gentle soft-tissue work on my neck and shoulders. From the tiny, imperceptible chin tucks to kick the core muscles into action to swaying my head from side to side like a loon while leaning against a door to loosen the outer muscles, I did them morning and evening. Gradually, it got better. It was the day I blow-dried my hair without wincing that I realised I was cured, and David pronounced my range of motion 'perfect'.
These days, I like to think that not only is my neck better, but that I'm a bit more empathic, and next time I'll believe someone when they tell me they're injured - without needing to experience it myself.
