Thunder Bay woman comes to grips with car crash

Life can turn on a dime.

One moment Nicole Richmond-Crowe was driving her car down a snowy road and the next she was in a ditch. This past January she said she was enjoying the music on the radio when suddenly she saw a pair of headlights approaching her car.

"And there's no time to react,, there's no time to do anything except brace for impact," she said.

 Richmond-Crowe is a lawyer who represents car crash victims.  She said she chose to go home that night, rather than to a hospital, because of the stories she heard from her work..

"I've been doing car accident litigation and how many times have I read emergency reports where people with whiplash they go to the hospital, they have to wait and wait and wait and the doctors says 'you got a mild case of whiplash, go home and rest and here's some anti-inflammatory medication," she said.

'all the little vertebrae are just disjointed and everything is like ricecrispiesin your neck' - Nicole Richmond-Crowe

For the first few days following the car crash Richmond-Crowe said she did not experience any symptoms.

At one point she decided to run on the treadmill and then the next day her condition changed dramatically.

"The next morning I woke up and I'm like there is a really serious problem here. I could not move, my neck was just awful. I don't know how to explain it except it feels inherently unstable," she said. "All the little vertebra are just disjointed and everything is like rice crispies."

 Richmond-Crowe said it felt like there was a knife was being jabbed into her behind one shoulder. She said what concerned her most was the number of people she dealt with as a lawyer who were suffering chronic pain for years.

The emotional impact 

Richmond-Crowe said a number of the clients she worked with carried a lot of anger and frustration over their accident injuries.  

"You feel that there's been an injustice done to you, your life has changed, everything has been altered and you're emotional stuck on that," she said.

Richmond-Crowe said that anger resonated with her and she decided she did not want to end up the same way.

In the end she had to go back to the accident scene and say good bye to her car, a car she credits with saving her life.

Richmond-Crowe, who is Anishinabe from the Pic River First Nation, collected up pieces of the car and performed a letting go ceremony. She said she stood under a nearby tree, made an offering of tobacco and acknowledged the event that took place in her life,

She expressed thanks for the experience, "for whatever reason this has happened to me thank you. I'm going to take this as an opportunity but I do not want to hold on to this pain anymore, I don't need it. I'm ready to learn whatever I needed to learn out of this I'm ready to let go of this pain."

Richmond-Crowe said she felt a really strong sense of relief and the acknowledgement was one of the first steps towards her healing.

She said her emotional recovery has  helped her to overcome physical impacts of the whiplash she suffered.