NEED TO KNOW
Ruthie Lindsey was just 17 when she was in a devastating car accident, days after being named homecoming queen
Years later, complications from the injury caused debilitating chronic pain that left her bedridden, even after having surgery intended to alleviate the pain
She documented her journey in her memoir, There I Am: The Journey From Hopelessness to Healing, and now helps others work through their pain and trauma
Ruthie Lindsey was a senior in high school when she was in a devastating car accident. The 17-year-old from Saint Francisville, Louisiana, had just been voted her high school’s homecoming queen days before being hit by an ambulance on November 2, 1996.
She broke three ribs, her left lung collapsed and her spleen ruptured. The teen also broke the top two vertebrae in her neck, C1 and C2. “Apparently, I had a 5 percent chance to live and a 1 percent chance to walk,” Lindsey, now 45, tells PEOPLE. “I was very lucky to be alive.”
Courtesy of Ruthie Lindsey
Ruthie Lindsey after her car accident in 1996
Doctors took bone from her left hip to use in her neck, and performed a spinal cord fusion with wires.
Nearly ten years later, the newlywed started experiencing intense pain.
“I was standing in front of a Starbucks one day and this crazy shooting pain went up my head that felt like I’d been electrocuted; it felt like lightning shooting up my head,” she says. “It was terrifying. I felt like I was going to either vomit or pass out.”
The pain became more frequent over the next five years. Despite multiple MRIs, doctors could not pinpoint a cause.
“This pain was so intense, but I think it was also kind of a trauma response,” she says. “I had never done any work around what had happened in my childhood or with this wreck.”
Soon, she was spending days in bed. “I got to stop showing up to a life that I didn’t really like that much, to be honest,” she says. “I got to take all these narcotics and watch shows and eat my feelings, and I was miserable.”
She describes this period in her life as a “dark, dark, scary, debilitating time.”
Courtesy of Ruthie Lindsey
Ruthie Lindsey’s high school classmates show support after her accident
Finally, in spring 2009, a doctor identified the source of her pain. An X-ray showed that the wire from her spinal fusion had broken and pierced her brain stem. She would need surgery to fix it.
Then, two weeks later, her father died.
She plunged into despair. “I was like, ‘If there’s a God, he must hate me.’”
Insurance didn’t cover the surgery she needed. But after her father’s unexpected death, people rallied around Lindsey. Her father had been a generous, beloved member of the community, and locals were eager to honor him by raising money for Lindsey’s lifesaving surgery.
In April 2010, she had surgery at the Mayo Clinic, where doctors took bone from her right hip and removed the piece of wire in her brain stem. “The rest was too dangerous to remove,” she says. Then C1, C2 and C3 were fused with titanium screws.
“I put all my hope into this surgery being the thing to save me and to take all the pain away and for me to be okay,” she says. But there were complications, and the surgery left her with intense nerve damage.
“I would’ve said I lived at a 10 on the pain scale before I had that surgery. But suddenly I was in the most pain I’d ever experienced in my entire life.”
Ashley LeMieux
Ruthie Lindsey
It was a huge setback.
“I moved into a deeper depression, because I felt like that procedure was supposed to save me and to heal me,” she says. “I went back to my bed for about two more years on even more narcotics. I was on the very highest level of fentanyl, morphine, hydrocodone, just all the drugs.”
At the same time, her marriage was coming to an end. “I couldn’t take care of myself,” she says. “My mom came and picked me up and took me back home to Louisiana.”
The shame was unbearable for the former cheerleading captain and homecoming queen. She thought a lot about who she used to be — and who she had become. “I had always been the most popular girl. And all of a sudden, the only reason I’m coming back home is because I’m having a nervous breakdown.”
But the breakdown was also the catalyst for Lindsey to change her life. “It started the journey of me doing deeper inner work and understanding more about the mind-body connection and trauma.” She slowly weaned herself off pain medication.
When she finally returned to Nashville, she began listening to her body and better understanding her pain. “Living with this has been really traumatic and exhausting and overwhelming and takes so much energy. And I think my body’s always speaking to me and calling me in to remember it,” she says.
In April 2021, Simon & Schuster published her memoir, There I Am: The Journey From Hopelessness to Healing.
Lindsey now works as a transformational coach in Nashville, offering one-on-one coaching to others who live with pain.
“I actually teach how pain is always inviting us in to do such deep inner work; it wants us to look at more of the emotional pain that we haven’t been willing to look at.”
She also leads an annual workshop called “The Invitation of Pain.”
“I get to help people meet their pain with as much self-compassion and kindness and gentleness,” she says.
She wants others who suffer to know they are not alone and “to have a new relationship with their bodies instead of something that is broken and needs to be fixed.”
And her personal experience with trauma and pain helps her better guide clients through their journeys. After all, she still lives with pain herself.
“It’s been, holy hell, it’s been really exhausting having this level of pain for 20-something years,”
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