[Justin14]

I don't have many memories of my accident...the one thing I clearly remeber is being tossed around in the water...I also have one snipit of being on a backboard(i think) and seeing my sister Piper crying..I seem to be reliving it a lot at night...does anyone else experiance this??

[JimG]

Mine wasn't dramatic.

I was racing my son skiing and we had a group of little kids come out of the trees in front of us and went to the side of the run full of moguls and hit a kicker too fast and crashed.

Their instructor came over and apologized as he helped pick up all of my gear.

I got up....told him only my ego was hurt and skied off.

It was a few weeks later when the symptoms started, but I ignored them, b/c I had no pain.

[Kev-O]

Justin14, on Feb 16 2010, 08:12 PM, said:

I don't have many memories of my accident...the one thing I clearly remeber is being tossed around in the water...I also have one snipit of being on a backboard(i think) and seeing my sister Piper crying..I seem to be reliving it a lot at night...does anyone else experiance this??

How long post injury are you?

[ClaraTaylor]

I used to get night mares where I'd relieve the accident for years after. Now five years post they don't appear any more. I was given the shiny label of PTSD and given counselling which was meant to help. Could you perhaps look into that?

[Justin14]

Kev-O, on Feb 16 2010, 10:54 PM, said:

Justin14, on Feb 16 2010, 08:12 PM, said:

I don't have many memories of my accident...the one thing I clearly remeber is being tossed around in the water...I also have one snipit of being on a backboard(i think) and seeing my sister Piper crying..I seem to be reliving it a lot at night...does anyone else experiance this??

How long post injury are you?

I'll be a year April 20th...A friends Dad who is injured from a tour in Iraq mentioned me having PTSD...He's almost 4 years post and still has nighmares.

[Beautiful]

I was injured 14 years ago, and I'm not gonna lie, I still have dreams about the accident. Not so much the actual accident, but the emotions that were with it. I remember feeling abandoned (no one would tell me if my mother was dead or alive), so not seeing her definitely hurt me. My dreams will sometimes be me in a car driving with my mom and sister down the freeway, and my sister will disappear. Then my mom will disappear, and I will be all alone in the car. Or once I had a dream I was riding a merry-go-round, and none of my family members were, and then for some reason, I had to say goodbye to them, because they were leaving me and could never visit me again. I don't know what the reason was, but any dream I have like this always makes me feel like I am 3 years old again. It puts me in a really weird mind-set.

Maybe it would help if you talked to someone? Because the injury is still so new, I think its completely normal to be reliving those moments.

[Soryfam]

I had a lot of nightmares after my SCI. I had a lot of nightmares while I was unconcious in the ICU and those would come back to me over and over. To me they were real, not dreams. I was diagnosed with PTSD. I started seeing a therapist when I was about 10 months post SCI. I am now about 2 years post SCI and I still see the therapist, just not as often. It really helped me to get past the nightmares. Another therapist in the group specializes in medications and he helped to put me on meds that helped me get to sleep and sleep well.
If you can get the therapy I really suggest you try it. I'm so sorry that you are going through this. I was a wreck for while. Thank God I found a way to get past it.

Sandy

[Tetracyclone]

I had endless loop bad dreams, or experiences, in ICU. I was not reliving the accident, but the drugs in combination with the mental disorientation of no feeling in my body had me hallucinating about full time. The only time I had relief was twice a day when my partner came to visit. My mind could orient itself to the familiarity of him, but the rest of the time- well, without the feeling of skin against sheets, or of one limb against another the mind comes unhinged. Later I found studies of people who put themselves in isolation tanks for days that found many of them suffered psychotic breakdowns. It is not true that if a little meditation is good for you then constant isolation from the outside world is even better. It has also been shown in prisoner isolation studies that people's minds tend to come unhinged when there are no familiar touchstones.

The drugs made me sleepy so it was even more difficult to figure out where or who I was. Or what I was. When I looked around to orient myself at night the walls bled bright blue light. This was not reassuring. After 6 or 8 days I figured out to remind myself "I can't feel where I am because my body can't feel. I was injured." This helped, the way a mantra gives one something to cling to.

Once out of ICU I continued to have nightmares whenever it was dark. Mean caretaker watched TV in the dark no matter how many times I asked her not to, and the colors reminded me of the hallucinations of ICU. Plenty of terror to go around, and I'm sure the lack of English speakers amplified the strangeness.

I developed several techniques to cope. One is that I assume any theme that repeats itself in my dreams holds some meaning, and that if I figure it out the dream will dissipate. i kept having one about Australia, where I'd visited the year before, and the inability to make it stop scared me. Again, I suppose the fear was related to being trapped in my body.

After some number of repetitions I figured out that there was a common element between the Australia experience, where I had hurt my back, and the fact that i had a fracture at T-5 that maintained a dull ache. it was a simple case of "reminds me of" and once I saw the association the dreams stopped.

The second technique i used to keep an even mental keel during the wee hours of the night, when I usually could not sleep (since I was in bed 24/7) and was prone to panic, was to concentrate very hard on math problems. I figured out all my tax deductions for the year and would insist that friends write down my figures when they visited. I worked out the square footage of my office space within our home to get the home office deduction.

Quite a lot got done, and once I got to where I could use my computer, I revved up TurboTax and got the forms done in time for the deadline. Of course, the first 3 times I opened the program I could NOT remember how to use it. I thought I'd lost my mental abilities for good!- but on the 4th try I started to remember how to use it, and it came back quickly after that.

After perhaps 8 weeks the panic from the nightmares had receded enough that I started to tell people about them, and that made them fade faster.

I continued to "relive" the accident itself once or twice a week as my mind sought to remember all the details. It usually involved a lot of crying during my private exercise sessions. I must have succeeded because I never think on it now, 20 months out.

[wheeliebear75]

As far as dreams of my accident go just of the split seconds JUST prior as I took that step backward & then the crunch of the sign hitting my skull. I have fear of falling objects........probably because my accident happened due to a falling object. If you're having nightmares then I'd suggest you go & talk to a counselor about it.......some therapy &/or medication may just be what you need.

[mjtpopus]

I was injured 15 years ago. I don't have nightmares about it. In fact, I don't remember the accident at all. I was extremely intoxicated. I don't know if I don't remember because I've repressed that memory or I was just too wasted and blacked out. I do remember being questioned by an EMT and telling her I couldn't move my legs right before I was loaded into the life flight helicopter. Either way...I think I'm blessed because I don't remember it.