Nobody Can See What’s Wrong With You

Complete Care 3.0

By: Dr. Kesten

If you’d broken your arm, this would all be easier.

You’d have a cast. People would sign it. Your boss would take one look and know. Your brother-in-law wouldn’t say anything.

Instead you got rear-ended, and you look exactly the same as you did the week before. No cast, no crutches, no bruise you can point at. Just a neck that won’t turn right and a headache that won’t let up.

And somewhere around the second week, you start noticing the looks.

The looks are the hard part

Your supervisor asks how you’re feeling in a tone that isn’t really asking.

Somebody at work makes a crack about your lawsuit.

Your wife, who has been good about all of this, mentions that you seemed fine at your nephew’s birthday. And you were. For about an hour. And then you paid for it all night, after everyone went home.

Nobody’s trying to be cruel. They just can’t see it. And after enough of that, you start wondering whether you’re making more of this than it is.

You’re not. Here’s why.

This kind of injury doesn’t show

What gets hurt in a car wreck is mostly the stuff that holds you together. Muscle. Ligament. The cushioning between the bones in your spine.

That kind of injury doesn’t puff up where people can see it. It doesn’t bruise purple. It doesn’t show on a regular X-ray.

It just hurts, and it stiffens you up, and it wears you down a little more every day.

Real and visible are two different things.

Why you look fine for an hour

This is the part that confuses everybody, including the people who love you.

You can usually do anything once. You can lift the cooler once. You can sit through a dinner. You can get through a shift if you have to.

What you can’t do is turn around and do it again tomorrow. The bill comes later — that night, or the next morning, when nobody’s watching.

The people judging you saw the hour you looked fine. They did not see the night.

What actually helps

Say it out loud, in plain words, to the people who matter. “I can do it once. I pay for it afterward.” Most people understand it immediately when you put it that way.

Keep a short note on your phone. What you did, what it cost you. Not for anybody else — for you. So on the day somebody makes you doubt yourself, you’ve got your own record of it.

And bring that note to your appointments. The things you figure don’t matter — the bad sleep, the headaches, the arm going numb at two in the morning — those are usually the things that tell us the most about what’s going on in there.

Bottom line

You don’t need anybody’s permission for this to be real.

You got hit. Something in there got stretched past where it goes. Nobody being able to see it doesn’t change a thing about what it’s doing to your week.