In high school, after playing a soccer game in the snow (yes, we do that in Michigan), instead of walking all the way to the gate, I did my usual climb to flip over the 6 foot wire mesh fence. At the top, my back muscles spasmed, and I lost control. Hitting the cold ground hurt. At some point over the next few days, the Tylenol that I was popping like candy wasn’t doing anything. I let my mother take me to the doctor. (I HATED going to any doctor so much that I would lie about how I felt all the time; ironic, I realize.) One B vitamin/muscle relaxer injection and painkiller pill bottle later, we went home to rest. The drugs knocked me out so hard that I slept that night, the entire next day, and that afternoon. The drugs made me feel terrible. I complained about it to my bff Naomi. She said, “Why don’t you go see my brother Keith? He’s a Chiropractor.” I replied, “What’s that?” I have no idea what she actually said, but I told my mom. Since she had seen one before and it helped her, she took me to see him. At 16 years old, I became a Chiropractic patient, and nothing was ever the same again.

Despite the incredible results, I was a pretty crappy patient. I didn’t comply very well, I would come and go depending upon my pain, I didn’t always do my rehab exercises, I used him as a band aid to patch me up after injury. Typical patient and typical teenager. He just kept serving and educating. No judging, only loving. Then, in a college soccer game, I ended up in the ER with a concussion. I don’t remember all the details. But we discovered later that I actually also broke two ribs and my L5 vertebrae while herniating the L5/S1 disc. I spent an entire summer on my back, getting adjusted, doing traction, trying to gain back the feeling in my entire leg, and crying in desperate fear as I often lost all motor control in my leg as well. It was a frightening time to be told I would never play sports again, and if I wasn’t careful during this time, could risk never walking again. And running was done.

Therefore, undergraduate college wasn’t the most fun time in my life. I listened to my doctors and decided team sports was too risky for my ultimate plans in life. I did rehab enough to play co-ed recreational league sports. But, this was still a great loss of joy for me. Add to it, I was plagued with a lot of mysterious illness after that injury. Significant amounts of chronic pain, fatigue, weight gain, depression, and foggy brain. This began a personal journey into figuring out how to heal myself since no one had an answer at the student health clinic. I dove into studying diets, supplements, weight training, and became a personal trainer for dozens of women on campus. It was a time of deep self reflection about my purpose and my true mission. I was deciding if I genuinely wanted to commit to medical school and took a year off to breathe after graduation.