Whiplash symptoms (1)

Well this is what happened to my head when I was bumped by that car. Looks scary doesn't it? I felt it. I felt it happening. I felt my head bending backward and bouncing back. I felt the cold, inner pain. It lasted for a split second but I knew It wouldn't have ended there.

Since I have decided to start writing this diary after two weeks from the accident I will need to resume how it progressed from day 2 to today. So this post will be a sort of history of how whiplash symptoms have manifested themselves during this time frame, at least from my perspective.

Day 1: I have been OK the day of the accident. No real problems. Just a bit of tenderness in the neck muscles. I thought I had been lucky overall and that now I should have started the long and consuming process to get my scooter repaired.

Day 2: Tenderness started to become more annoying. I felt stiffer in the neck compared to day 1 and that was starting to feel uncomfortable. I thought it would have been a good idea to take some medication. I took nurofen that evening before going to bed.

From Monday 3rd to Tuesday 4th: I was feeling really bad. I felt pain in the neck and stiffness of the neck muscles. The movement range of my neck was reduced and certain positions were painful to take (bending left or right, bending backward). I decided to stay home and rest. I booked a visit at ALLSPORTS for the 4th of November to have my neck checked.

In the meanwhile the accident made me lost a research trip with my group I had been asked to participate on Monday the 3rd for 3 days. The trip would have been on Stradbroke Island and would have involved diving and underwater photography. Obviously I decided not go given the neck pain and discomfort.

From the 4th to the 11th of November: I started doing the exercises the physiotherapist assigned me to do (a very mild stimulation of the inner muscles of the neck) to try and ease the stiffness and tenderness I was feeling. After a couple of days from the first visit, pain was gone, except when I tryed to bend my neck too much. I went back to work on Thursday 6th. I continued taking Nurofen once a day as suggested by the physiotherapist.

On the 11th I went to physio again. We had established to start a program of rehab and to meet once a week to asses progresses. At this stage my neck looked much better than the week before. Less stiff, less tender, more mobile. I t appeared as it was recovering well. I was given the same exercises as the week before and suspended nurofen.

From 11th to 18th of November: This has been so far the worst week. All the symptoms that seemed to be gone came back and new ones appeared. By the end of this week, 15th to 18th I experienced feeling of heaviness of my head, and fragility of my neck. I felt like I didn't have a proper control on the stability of the head. I couldn't keep the same position for prolonged periods of time. I couldn't stand still or sit longer than 30 - 40min per session without feeling tiredness, soreness of the neck and shoulder and pain of the neck and shoulders.

I have had the feeling of my body urging me to lay down and rest my neck. Since th 16th I started feeling a sensation of nausea in the late afternoons. It is not very strong and I do not know if it is related to the whiplash but it is there. The only positions i can stand is when the weight of my head is taken off the neck.

On the 18th of November I went to physio and told all this to my physiotherapist. He decided to add another exercise to stimulate the inner muscles of my neck and we decided to increase the frequency of my visits. The idea is to try and asses it more frequently and also to try to keep me symptomless with an increased frequency of manipulations and massages. I have to say the physio sessions have been helping a lot and the days of the visits have always been the best (in terms of absence of symptoms) of these weeks.

Unfortunately, after I started yesterday, for the first time, to do the new exercise the physiotherapist introduced in the routine, I felt immediatly soreness in my neck. I decided to stop there but the pain escalated in intensity and turned into an headache eventually. I contacted my physiotherapist this morning and we decided to remove that excercise from the routine for now.