Rebirth of the Old Me

I am SO GLAD to be able to write that title header for this post. Since the car accident I haven't felt like "me" for a very long time. This Friday will be the one-year mark and it's been quite a journey. First of course was the physical recovery, which was far more difficult and took a lot longer than I ever could have imagined. If you really want to recover from a serious injury it is a lot of work and you have to try really really hard, and do it often.
Then there was the mental recovery. I did have a very bad concussion. I was told a speech pathologist would come and test me every day to see how scrambled my brains were. I only remember the day I passed her test and was able to get out of ICU. Like the deep bruises on my arm, I believe my brain took a longer time than expected to recover, too. There had to have been quite a sloshing of grey matter when I hit the driver's side window and shattered it at 65 mph. Hardest has been the emotional recovery. Now that I seem to have my old body back and working pretty much the way it used to and my brain is back up and running at its usual pace, bits and pieces of the accident come back to haunt me. Just little snatches of a very terrifying time. The past few days I've been remembering the extrication and my hands are shaking just writing about it. It seems as if they peeled the door back like an orange to get to me. That is what I'm remembering anyway. It's not a very pleasant memory. When I read the accident report it talks about how I complained about so much pain - my head, my shoulder, my legs. I don't remember any pain at all. The body and mind are so amazing in that they allow you to deal with only what you can handle. So it's doling out these bad memories in tiny bits for me to process and put aside. I'm very grateful for that.
But most of all, I'm grateful to be "me" again. God blessed me with a magnificent, fully-functioning body and I'm able to have it all back again. And while I'm not brilliant, I at least have a "normal" brain and am capable of returning to all my hobbies and interests again with the same passion I had before.
Lots of powerful lessons learned on this very scary journey. Who ever would have thought that just being "the old me" again would be the greatest gift ever and fill me with such joy? But here I am, saying just that, and my heart swells with happiness!