When the Pain Doesn't Go Away

March 24, 2009 — -- She was a lucky woman -- she had a doting husband and beautiful children. She thrived as a professor of classic literature.

But another stroke of luck -- surviving a horrific car accident at age 19 with injuries that could have paralyzed her, or worse -- would come back to haunt her more than two decades later.

"I had fulfilling work and a beautiful family," Lynne Greenberg said. "And really, I can't emphasize enough how it changed on a dime."

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Twenty-two years earlier, Lynne Greenberg was a passenger in a car when the driver lost control. She was thrown out of the car and broke her neck close to the brain. After a painful recovery she was able to resume a normal life.

She married ABC News producer Eric Avram and they became the parents two Ben and Lilly. And then, one day, the pain came back -- and never left.

"I was working in a library, and I suddenly got a severe pain from my neck," Greenberg said."And it shot straight through my head, and it's never gone away."

Greenberg wrote about her journey in pain and her life as a wife, mother and teacher, in her new book "The Body Broken."

Greenberg said she's in pain "all the time."

"To get out of bed was a major event," she said, "I would sort of have to think about it for a half an hour before getting up."

Greenberg said she found out that, 22 years earlier, the neck brace she wore after the accident had been taken off too early and the bone in her neck had not fused correctly.

The nerves in her neck had been permanently seared by her injuries, making her a member of a club no one wants to belong to. She is now one of the legions of people dealing with chronic pain.