3/17/2020.  St. Patrick’s Day.  Tuesday.  I have two new clients on my schedule this afternoon and I have my granddaughter Neala with me as well.  The massage room is hers for another day and she is excited.  I planned a fun activity for both of us.  Do a jiggling video LIVE on Facebook.  It will be a little embarrassing for me with my heaviness and bouncing boobs and all, but it will be fun.  We need some humor today in light of all the Covid-19 stuff that is escalating.  If I help one person by doing it, then great.  After I picked up Neala, we ran to Menards on the off chance I could find a few particle construction masks for my office.  It was a thought, but I knew my chances were limited.  Of course they were out, so we grabbed some snacks, bottled water, etc.

City-wide changes were happening fast and furious.  Recommendations for closing restaurants in the region were starting.  Bars were being ordered to close down.  Take out or curbside food pick up recommendations only.  Minn...

3/16/20:  Monday – It was a strange morning.  Almost normal, but not normal all the same.  I didn’t have any appointments scheduled in the morning, so I planned on finalizing all my personal taxes for my accountant this year.  I just needed to scan things into their secure system and let them work their magic or come back with questions. I had to reprint my Edward Jones Consolidated 1099 and noticed the value dropped 10K overnight – What the fuck! I looked up my 401K from Feb to March and it dropped nearly 100K.  I had no idea.  The traders obviously knew something was up, but I was largely unaware. Decades of saving for my retirement years vanished in a blink.   These things go up and down all the time.  The last big drop was back around 2008.  The best thing to do was just sit tight and not react to the sudden changes.  I hope I am right.  It is my retirement.  If I lose it all, I have nothing to live on when I get older. That’s a fine how do you do for working two jobs most of your ...

3/15/2020:  It was a Sunday.  I woke up early per my usual schedule.  Actually, my dogs woke me up to go outside around 5:30am and I could not get back to sleep.  I thought…you know…it might not be a bad time to get a few more groceries as our cupboards are getting bare.  My schedule at the office has been just insane, having me work several 10-12 hour days for the past 2.5 months.  Little time to shop for groceries and cook healthy.  If we’re heading to a quarantine like they are doing overseas, we will need more food.  I figured I should arm my office for more protection, so I added hand sanitizer to my list so I can have my clients be sure to wash/sanitize their hands when they come in.  I have cleaning supplies already and plenty of toilet paper I thought jokingly, but I’ve always bought that in bulk, so there truly was not concern in my mind.  

No luck with the hand sanitizer, they were out. I should have known with all the hoarding that has started.  I did find some baby wipes t...

3/14/2020 it was Saturday.   I felt the need to share information on my Facebook pages about my office, and being the voice of calm with following recommendations from the CDC and address some of the questions I was getting in my office.  Standard hygiene for Medical Standard Precautions, extra cleaning efforts in my office between patients, HEPA filter already in place, etc.  At this point, it was still “like a flu” but more aggressive in my mind. 

I had not gotten any information from the MN Nursing Board directly.  I looked at their website and there was simply recommendations to follow the Center for Disease Control and World Health Organization guidelines.  I was proactively monitoring the CDC guidelines, World Health Organization guidelines and paying attention to the governing bodies in Minnesota.  I avoided watching anything from President Trump himself because I don’t trust him and don’t like his approach to most things, and have always felt he was a bully.  In general, I don...

March 11-13, 2020 , the conversations with my clients started to have more intensity tied to them.  A couple had very significant concerns and wondering if they should wear a mask when they came to their myofascial release appointments at my office, etc.  Again, from what I was hearing, only those who were known to be sick should be wearing masks.  Those considered healthy should not.  That was the directive from the Center for Disease Control (CDC)  If they were sick, they were to stay home.  The information about being contagious for days before symptoms arrive had just started to be reported.

What was I missing?   I started to pay more attention to then news and social media.  Good and bad I guess…but now I was beginning to understand more as cases were hitting the borders of the US – New York, Washington, California.  I knew offices were sending people to work from home where possible.  This would have been a possibility when I worked for my former Employer UnitedHealthcare, but I...

Less than a week later, on my return to the US, it was largely uneventful beyond the delays due to weather.  Once I landed in Chicago, the international return for Customs was a little different.  The touch screen kiosks were all familiar, but most of the airport staff were wearing masks and gloves.  Some of the travelers from different countries were also wearing masks.  Again, the most important question was with regard to whether or not I had been to mainland China.  There was a question about whether or not I was around domestic livestock.  I answered yes, I had gone to Dolphin Cove and swam with the dolphins and I did pet and feed a camel at Dolphin Cove.  They waived me through.

I returned to work for the remainder of the week at the end of February, and prepped furiously for the Women’s Expo on Saturday, February 29.   I was thinking it sure would have been nice if it was a week later because I had little time to pull things together.  There was growing concern of the Corona...

We knew the virus was coming, the Coronavirus that is.  We knew it was an aggressive type flu.  How was this any different to me than the former potential pandemics I have seen over the past couple of decades? The swine flu, the bird flu, the Ebola virus, H1N1 – all situations I had heard about, worried cautiously about, but survived without seeing any direct impacts in my region to cause me alarm.  Several strains of flu occur in our population every winter and we just hoped not to catch it, but if we did, we would get over it.   

I honestly didn’t see this as being anything different for the Coronavirus.  Just another really aggressive type flu bug when the flu typically has a death toll every year for specific populations.  I don’t want to get the flu, but I don’t necessarily fear it for myself or my family.  At least, not until this year, 2020.

This year I was able to go to Jamaica for a business trip for a Mastermind meeting, February 21-February 25.  Long travel days on both en...

I hit my low point after pulling my hamstring at the gym.  I was still seeing my Chiropractor at that point, but knew I wasn’t really progressing.  I felt kind of hopeless.  The adjustments, electrical stimulation, ultrasound, and hot/cold packs weren’t doing much more for me than a hot soak in the tub and sports creams that I could do at home.   

I remembered I had met a Myofascial Release Therapist at a gym a while back and still had his card.  I knew MFR was different than anything else I had done in the past. Having done PT in with mixed results, Massage, and Chiropractic, I decided I needed to try something different.  I had nothing to lose. I wasn’t really getting better with what I was doing; I was actually getting worse.  It took about 3 sessions before I could finally sleep comfortably on my back again.  My pain wasn’t gone, but my symptoms were changing, things were shifting.  It took several months of working on my scar tissue, correcting my unbalanced pelvis, opening up fa...

I talked about how I thought my inactivity and weight gain played a role in my back and neck pain.  Because of that notion, I joined a fitness program called UBC.  I worked through an aggressive fitness routine for several months.  I lost a lot of weight, trimmed down, but I also gained many new pain points in my body. 

My achilleas tendons were sore in the morning, my back was always tight, my shoulders hurt.   My arms would fall asleep and go numb at night and sometimes while working on the computer. My neck was getting so tight I was having a hard time turning my head while driving.  So yes, I lost weight and got stronger, but my body was getting tighter and tighter, even though I was stretching. 

I was puzzled and frustrated at the same time.  I was falling apart at the seams.  At this point, my regularly scheduled relaxation massage turned into a more frequent session trying to loosen me up and reduce my pain levels.   After nearly 9 months of not being able to sleep on my back,...

So I have shared part of my personal health story with some ups and downs of my experience with traditional medicine, but I haven’t shared how Myofascial Release made such a big impact on me. 

While I finally found relief from my chronic pain for a couple of years, “Life Happened” and my lifestyle was catching up with me and taking a toll on my body.  I sat at a desk all day in a stressful leadership role in an insurance company.  I worked 10-12 hours a day tied to my phone and computer.  I wasn’t exercising anymore and I had put on a lot of weight. My back and neck would bother me periodically, but the back pain was continuing to progress significantly.  

With my love of camping in the BWCA, I was noticing that it was getting harder and harder to physically do that trip.  Yes, I was getting older, but honestly, it was getting extremely uncomfortable laying on the ground. I was tossing and turning constantly.  My hips would hurt when I laid on my side.  My low back would hurt when I ...