A dramatic accident
On November 19, 1989, I was involved in a dramatic traffic accident. I was driving a fairly large Audi and the roads were slippery. I stopped beside the middle line waiting to cross the road. Another car, a Volvo 240, stopped behind me. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw no other cars behind us. Suddenly, my car was shunted forward. I knew something must have happened. Those who had seen the accident said that a small Renault had hit the Volvo behind me with such a speed that it ended up with the front up on the Volvo’s trunk. The Volvo then hit my car with such force that the frame of the car became twisted.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t seated against the backrest when the accident happened and moreover, I was sitting obliquely in order to look sideways. From that moment, my life was turned upside down. An expert who looked at my scans ten years later informed me that I had severe injuries to my neck, where among other things, in my neck, the discs between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae were fully lying on top of each other. Ligaments, muscles, and nerves had been affected.
Life turned upside down
Everything changed after the accident. I’ve had two children, had two root canal treatments, broken a leg, and more, but the pain that I now experienced was on another level. The pain was constant and totally drained my strength. To survive daily life became a difficult struggle. The only painless moments that I had were when I slept. I experienced concentration difficulties and impaired short-term memory. The symptoms were similar to those of dementia except for the worst type of confusion. I had always had an easy time reading and learning new things, but now I couldn’t even piece three sentences from the newspaper together in a meaningful manner. I could only remember the last two or three words of these sentences. Crossword puzzles had by then become a favourite of mine, and now in hindsight I understand that this was because I only had to remember one word at a time. I also got a very nasty tinnitus: untuned horrendous violins in a symphony orchestra that never took a break. I got terrible dizziness, couldn’t turn my head without clutching myself, and had to quit riding my bike and running. Pain, tinnitus, and palpitation in combination also meant I was unable to sleep without sleeping pills over a great many years. I was forty-three years old and by and large hadn’t been ill before, but was now forced to quit working.
Cumbersome tremors
When I was around 55 years old, I noticed that my head started to shake. It developed little by little so that I didn’t really know when it began. Many of my relatives on my father’s side had suffered from this. They couldn’t use cutlery, drink without a straw, etc. When my father was approximately seventy years old, his hands shook so much that he had to mandate his children to sign documents in his stead because he was no longer capable of writing his own name. When I turned sixty, my hands shook so much that I was starting to think to whom I should give my mandate.
Tuina gave good results
Thus, I had a very tough time, was feeling like a shaking ninety-year-old and constantly suffered from pains. I had no energy. At this time, my son began to give me Tuina. He had learned this from the European Zhineng Qigong training school and had done Qigong training with them too. I noticed at once that it was effective. The pain markedly lessened. I had more energy, could concentrate more, and also slept better. Because the results were so good, I received Tuina every time we met, which wasn’t as often as I would have liked it to be. I live in northern Norway and he has moved to Stockholm, so meeting often is not that easy. Even though I got a bit worse again between the times we met, I became better and better after after having Tuina. Throughout the years, I’ve also – to my great surprise – observed that I’m shaking less and less. My head tremors very little and today I’m writing well despite being over seventy years old.
A hiking accident
In August, 2002, I was involved in an accident when hiking in the mountains. My boot got stuck between two boulders, and I lost balance, and fell straight backward. There was a sharp angle on my leg approximately ten centimetres above the ankle. It was the first hike for which we had brought mobile phones with us, and that was lucky. We called the emergency number and they summoned an ambulance helicopter. Because it took some time before I was rescued, my foot had become so swollen that the boot had to be cut apart. The doctors noted that I had broken both the shin and shank, and the fractures were oblique. The treatment consisted of inserting a nail in the shank that was attached to the knee and ankle. After it had healed for a while, I wanted the nail to be removed because it poked at the knee whenever I was walking on stairs. When extracting the nail, they had to break off bone tissue that had begun to grow on the nail.
After all of this, I noticed that my leg was crooked since there was a twist in the bone where it had fractured. The foot pointed about thirty degrees outward and the broken leg was markedly shorter than the other. I had a conspicuous bump on the shin. Walking was okay, but sometimes it hurt. Worse was cross-country skiing. I tried, but it was awkward getting my feet to point in the same direction. When I tried, I had a lot of pain. As I really wanted to ski, we tried to find different solutions, such as attaching the shoe obliquely on the ski to reduce the strain on the leg. But this solution didn’t work so well, and I simply had to quit skiing.
Less pain and straight leg
Several years after I broke my leg, I was visiting my son during a midsummer. We strolled outside in the fine morning weather. As we sat down to eat dinner with the family, I felt pain in my leg. Our walk had perhaps been too long. I asked my son if he could give me some Tuina against the leg pain. He massaged a few points for a couple of minutes, the pain immediately disappeared, and I could enjoy the rest of the evening. Early next morning, I bent forward and accidentally looked at my feet. I was very surprised when I saw that both of my feet were pointing forward! My left leg had the same angle as my right! I had to look three or four times before I could believe it. I decided directly to start skiing again. So when winter came, I fastened my skis and skied as well as prior to breaking my leg!
Gun-Erna