NEW PALESTINE — For eight years, she spent 90 percent of her time lying in bed with the lights off and the door shut. The tiniest sound would trigger a piercing headache. A steady, blinding pain all over her body had become a constant in her life.
Becky Adams could barely stand after the car accident. Every time she tried, the pain returned and rendered her incapable of moving. She rarely left her bedroom. She relied on her husband and children to tend to her every need.
Worst of all, she’d grown completely dependent on the daily cocktail of painkillers and medications her doctor had prescribed. And there didn’t seem to be an end to that routine in sight.
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Click here to purchase photos from this galleryUntil one day, she quit.
She replaced the pills with a 40-pound dumbbell that she can now curl with ease. She traded in her dark and lonely bedroom for three- to four-hour daily workouts and yearlong bodybuilding competitions showcasing the physique she hones week in and week out.
She’s transformed herself into someone else, someone stronger than she was before. She’s reclaimed her body, reclaimed herself from the substances that once controlled her.
Coping with the pain
Adams, of New Palestine, doesn’t even remember the crash, the moment she was T-boned by another driver as she tried to pull out of the parking lot of her apartment complex. It happened in 2006 and put her in a hospital bed for 10 months, she said.
She crushed all of her ribs on her left side. She sustained severe head trauma and multiple internal injuries. She broke her pelvis in three places.
A ruptured diaphragm. A collapsed lung. The list went on.
Her doctors insisted she take medication for the pain. They prescribed high dosages; but the pills never truly relieved the agony she felt. She went from doctor to doctor, trying to find a solution to her suffering, but the solution never came.
“I felt like that’s when my life was over,” Adams said, her hands shaking as she revisited the memory. “I felt like I was dying. It was always more medicine, more medicine, more medicine.”
Adams was bedridden for the better part of eight years, in a never-ending state of withdrawal from taking opioid-based painkillers.
Seeing her in that state, knowing there was no way to help her, took a toll on her family, her husband, Mike Adams, said.
“The doctors made her so dependent on these narcotics she was taking,” he said. “One time she went in for surgery, and they had to give her three times the (normal) dose of pain medicine for it to work as an anesthetic.”
Eventually, depression took hold of Becky Adams. She was tired of feeling like a burden to her family, tired of the pain, tired of the drug dependency, she said.
In 2014, she took a fatal dose of the pills she’d been prescribed, trying to take her own life.
Thankfully, she survived the attempted suicide; and though her exasperation remained, she came out on the other side with a plan, a determination to regain control of her life.
So, she stopped taking all of her medications. Quit cold turkey.
“I didn’t care at that point if I lived or died,” Adams said. “My doctors advised against it … They kept telling me I wouldn’t be able to function without (drugs). They said I wouldn’t live without it. I said, ‘OK, I don’t care.’”
Building a new life
What followed was an entire year of battling withdrawal symptoms — constant sickness, headaches and sleepless nights.
Her husband encouraged her to take a little bit, to ween herself off the meds. But she refused.
Gradually, she started feeling better. She was no longer dependent on the narcotics she’d become accustomed to taking for years, Adams said.
By January 2015, she felt she’d made it through the worst of the pain.
Her next big step was walking through the doors of Greenfield’s Family Fun and Fitness, where little by little she rebuilt her body.
At first, she had trouble making it up a flight of stairs. She could barely curl a five-pound dumbbell. It took all her willpower to resist the discouragement she felt, to turn away and go back to bed.
Adams recalled one night she sat in the car in the gym’s parking lot, still in pain from simple exercises, and found herself crying alone, feeling helpless.
And then a song came on the radio — “Just be Held” by Casting Crowns, a Christian rock band.
“Your world’s not falling apart, it’s falling into place,” the singer croons in the song. “You’re not alone.”
It was an epiphany, Adams said. Wallowing in isolation and self-pity wasn’t going to get her anywhere, she realized.
“Everybody has a story. Mine wasn’t an exception,” Adams said, wiping a tear from her cheek as she recalled the moment. “Mine wasn’t anything special. I always said ‘why me?’… But I finally realized that everybody’s got a story. No matter what it is.”
From that point forward, Adams became dedicated to changing her story. She wasn’t going to be that poor woman whose life was ruined in a car accident, whose brain was overpowered by substances that were supposed to help her.
She set a goal: she’d train every day for a bodybuilding competition scheduled to take place a year later.
It was the best thing she ever did, she said. She changed her eating habits and became a fixture in the local gym. Months went by as she logged her reps at the weight machine and her steps on the stair climber.
Adams entered her first bodybuilding competition in April 2016, and since then bodybuilding has become a lifestyle.
‘Living proof’
Adams inspires the regulars on the treadmills and weight stations at Family Fun and Fitness, said Paula Phillips, the gym’s general manager. Her progress in the last three years serve as a visual reminder to everyone to keep at their personal goals, she said.
Many even look to Adams as a leader, Phillips said. They see the changes she made, the strength gained, and they want that for themselves.
“She’s living proof that you can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it,” Phillips said.
Adams’ family say they hardly recognize her now as the woman who was in that accident years ago.
“She’s 100 percent a different person,” Mike Adams said. “She went from somebody who is lying in bed all the time in a dark room to somebody who’s wanting to get up and go. She’s pure energy, going all the time.”
And more importantly, she’s gotten her smile back, Adams said. The grin friends and family always saw in her face had disappeared for a long time after the crash, she said. They see it more and more often now and remark about how joyful she seems, she said.
She doesn’t plan on stepping away from this life she’s built anytime soon, she said.
“Some people live their lives letting whatever their situation is be in control,” she said, “when the reality is we are in control.”
