Well… this feels awkward! But necessary…

Since my goal is to create a space where people feel comfortable sharing questions and getting vulnerable, I guess I’ll start.

My story starts with scoliosis. I was just a kid. I don’t have great recollection of the full timeline, but I do have vivid, visceral memories of being an eleven year old girl in a doctor’s office, hearing the doctor say the curve got really big and they need to operate. Full spinal fusion.

I think, for my age, I handled it relatively well. I sat in my mother’s lap and silently wept tears of fear, disbelief and grief. In my short journey with this condition, I felt like it was already robbing me of a normal childhood and adolescence.

So my parents scheduled the surgery. I went in very early on December 4th. They wheeled me in the operating room, put the mask over my face and I panicked until the anesthetic kicked in and I fell asleep. After the surgery I did some inpatient physical therapy and they sent me home to recover. All told, I missed six weeks of school and had to be out of PE for six months. Then, nothing. I went back to dancing and figuring out how to move forward. I’ve done all right since then, managed to stay relatively active and fit. Running, triathlons, yoga and Pilates took the place of dancing but otherwise I had no issues with my back.

The field of physical therapy stuck with me. In college I decided to pursue it as my career. One undergraduate degree and a Doctorate later, I left the safety of the classroom as a baby PT full of ideas but little direction. I’ve spent time working with kids in both hospital-based and outpatient settings, as well as adolescents and adults managing the effects of neurological diseases and injuries. I started having pain during my first pregnancy while I worked full time in an outpatient brain injury clinic and had my mind blown with the pelvic health specialty. For the first time since school, I fell in love with how amazing our bodies are and how interconnected our muscles are. I left that clinic for an in-house mentorship with a local pelvic health guru and some more advanced coursework to become more familiar with the pelvic floor muscles. I learned so much under that mentorship and stayed on after, gathering more experience and knowledge.

Things changed again during my second pregnancy. I was not in as good of shape as I was for my first, and my pelvic pain began much sooner. Unlike my first, this pregnancy felt much harder and I was limited by pain in doing many things, like more strenuous housework and lifting patients at work. I saw a few therapists at work for help, before my daughter was born and then afterward. It seemed things weren’t working as well. I became aware of a local PT who specialized in scoliosis specific PT, known as the Schroth Method. For the first time, I had an expert who was able to describe how scoliosis forms, the ways it impacts the whole body, and some strategies to protect my back and strengthen the right muscles to improve my posture and decrease my pain. This PT desperately wanted to expand her practice, but needed someone who had the advanced training to teach this method. She sponsored my certification training and I joined her practice.

Ten years after getting my Doctorate and starting out, I’m still in love with PT. Helping people learn about their bodies and empowering someone else’s health journey is my absolute favorite thing. I hope that I’ll be able to do it on a larger scale in this space.

Pelvic health concerns and the knowledge on pelvic PT as an intervention has gained a lot of traction in the past several years, which is fantastic, but there’s still a huge knowledge gap for the vast majority of people. I feel similarly about the treatment of scoliosis, which unfortunately hasn’t changed much (medically) since I was diagnosed almost 30 years ago. Doctors offer “wait and see”, bracing and surgery as the only options and don’t teach families much at all about how it happens, or that there are more conservative methods to try, like Schroth PT.

Even now, twenty years later, December 4th is still a very introspective day for me. It marks the first day my life changed. It’s a nice reminder to reflect on the experience, appreciate what it has brought me and how far I’ve come.

Thanks for reading my story. I’d love if you would share a defining moment that changed your life in the comments, and why you’re thankful for it.