My name is Lynn Hahn. I'm a fitness expert and a lifestyle and weight management coach. I create and produce fitness DVDs for women. My website is www.getrealfit.org I hope you'll come and visit me there (:
I hurt my neck about 20 years ago during a sparring class. I was new to the sparring part of my art. I had a terrible teacher. He put me with a very nice young man who didn't know what he was doing either. My partner was more than twice my weight. I was only about 100 pounds at the time.
The teacher just went and fought with other advanced students not paying any attention to us. We were completely unsupervised. It was an accident waiting to happen!
I was wearing a helmet so my vision was very limited on the sides. I thought class was over so I went to walk away. My partner didn't know that so he kept the fight going on. As I turned to leave he threw a spinning outward crescent kick to my head. I went flying across the room and hit the wall.
I was unconscious for a bit. When I came to I was surrounded by people. My crappy teacher was asking me "are you okay?" I thought my jaw was broken. I came around and the teacher allowed me to drive home. My son who was just about 6 or 7 saw the whole thing. I wanted him to think I was okay and that it was no big deal so I tried to shake it off.
That night I had terrible pains shooting down my arm. My doctor sent me to a physical therapist because he thought it was my rhomboid muscles and they just needed to be loosened.
I told the physical therapist that my neck hurt so he pulled on it. The next day my left arm lost most of it's strength. I was doing push ups and landed on my face.
I went back to the doctor and he sent me to a osteopathic doctor. I told him my neck hurt and asked if he could do an adjustment. He told me he wasn't into making people paraplegics. He had the personality of "House".
He sent me to get an MRI. They were pretty new at that time so the only available unit was a mobile unit that went from hospital to hospital. It was very archaic.
Turned out my C7 disc was herniated. They wanted to do surgery right away. I knew that too was not a slick surgery so I declined and worked with a different physical therapist and a neurologist to try to heal my disc.
It took a long time but I did get considerable recovery. They never did another MRI to substantiate my recovery. MRI's were very expensive back then and my insurance was not going to support receiving that service unless it was an emergency.
My neck would hurt off and on after that. Traction helped get me back to normal.
About a year and half ago my neck locked up. I was in screaming pain. My husband made me go to a neurosurgeon to have it check out. It was bad! 4 herniated discs and a slipped vertebrae. Surgery was my only option.
I'm still healing so my full out come is not clear but I'm glad I did the surgery. My life changed. I had to close my martial art school ( I did go back to the martial arts after the injury and earned my 3rd black then opened a school where the students were watched ) and my fitness career went on hold.
Life does that though. I've been finding more ways to be creative. It took me a year to get some strength back but now that I can use my workouts I'm getting back into great shape. They really are fantastic workouts!
So there you go that's my story. I hope you get the information you need from this blog.
To your health!
Lynn Hahn
