I have been waiting two years to sit down and have this conversation. Not because we have not been talking, Jonathan Morrison has been in my office regularly since he first found his way here,but because some stories need time before you can tell them properly. This is one of those.
Jonathan is a content creator and filmmaker with a significant following. When he posted a short video about his experience at Well Connected a couple of months into his care, I had 30 new patients in 30 days from around the world. I had no idea at the time who he was or the reach he had. What I knew was that a man had walked into my office who could barely speak, who was in tremendous pain, and who had written me a letter because he could not find the words out loud to explain the depths of where he was.
That letter broke my heart and steeled my resolve at the same time. I knew I could help him. I just needed the chance.
Shingles. Then More Shingles. Then Everything Else.
Jonathan's story starts in 2022 with a shingles outbreak that got into his eye and caused scarring. That was bad. Then it came back in 2023, ten times worse. The virus activated deep cranial nerve dysfunction: cranial nerve six, the vagus nerve, and cranial nerve twelve, which controls the tongue. That last one is why he could not speak when he came in. His tongue was not working the way it was supposed to.
But here is what the doctors he had seen before me kept missing: it was not just a viral issue. The underlying structural problem in his neck was creating the environment in which nothing could properly heal. The compression around his cervical spine was affecting cerebrospinal fluid flow, the vascular and arterial dynamics of the brain, and the function of multiple cranial nerves simultaneously.
When doctor after doctor told him it was in his head, they were not entirely wrong. They just did not understand what they were saying. It was in his head, in the form of wicked cranial nerve dysfunction and a nervous system operating under severe structural compression. The answer was not antidepressants and mood stabilizers. The answer was getting to the root.
Groundhog's Day for a Year
Jonathan described the year before he found me in a way I want to share because I think it will resonate with anyone who has ever been in a place where the days blur into each other and you lose track of which way is forward.
He made games with himself to get through the hours. If I can make it to noon without going back to bed, then I will try for 2:00 p.m. Then 4:00. Then 6:00. His dreams were more vivid than his waking life. He lost his sense of what a day was, what night was. He was depleted in a way that did not respond to anything anyone was offering him.
He was also angry. At the situation, at the world, at whatever it was that had taken his functioning body and replaced it with something he did not recognize. He was not someone who had given up on wanting to be here. He was someone who was exhausted from fighting so hard to get back to a life that kept receding.
What kept him in the fight was his mother. He had watched her lose her husband, Jonathan's stepfather, suddenly and traumatically when Jonathan was eighteen. He had watched her face in that hospital room, that flicker of hope every time a monitor beeped, and the defeat that followed. He did not want to be another loss for her to carry. That was the thread he held.
I told him: I know that thread. My own daughter Lauren was mine for many years. You hold what you can hold, and you keep going.
He Found Me Through Kevin Pecca
Jonathan had already been to one upper cervical doctor before he found me, and it had not gone well. He was not giving up, but he was running low. He was falling asleep at night listening to anything he could find, and one of those things was Dr. Kevin Pecca's podcast, where Kevin had interviewed me. Jonathan went through every episode. He found my story. Something in it gave him enough to schedule an appointment.
He canceled the other appointment he had lined up in Los Angeles and came to Well Connected instead. He was so foggy on that first visit that driving past my old office recently felt like a fever dream to him. He could barely navigate. He wrote the letter because he could not speak clearly enough to explain what he needed me to know.
I read that letter and I knew: this is exactly why I do this work.
The Cone Beam CT Changed Everything
What the imaging showed us gave the whole picture a structural foundation. The bulging disc, the compression in the neck, the way everything was interfering with the systems that were supposed to be keeping Jonathan functional. We did a Blair upper cervical correction. And when it held, things began to shift.
Not overnight, and not in a straight line. Two years of healing rarely is. But the trajectory changed. The Groundhog's Day cycle broke. The fog began to lift, layer by layer, the way healing always works when you finally address the root.
By the time we sat down for this episode, Jonathan was coming in once a month, consistently holding his correction, and functioning in a way he had genuinely wondered if he would ever reach again. He flew to Florida last year, which was the first real travel he had been able to do, and sat in Dr. Pecca's office in St. Augustine with a clear enough head to enjoy a steak dinner and a conversation.
He told me in this episode something I will not forget: if he could go back and reverse it all, he is not sure he would. Because he would never have met the people he has met or gone down the path that brought him here. That is not a small thing to be able to say after what he went through to get there.
If You Can't Find That Person, Be That Person
Dr. Pecca shared something with Jonathan early on that has stayed with him: a priest told Kevin that when you are suffering, you need to find someone who went through what you went through. And if you cannot find that person, be that person.
Jonathan is becoming that person. The video he posted brought 30 people from around the world to my door. His willingness to document his journey honestly, in the fog and the anger and the slow, nonlinear crawl back, has already given other people a thread to hold. That is the power of telling the truth about hard things before you are fully out of them.
This is part one of Jonathan's story. Part two is coming, and there is more to tell. In the meantime, if any part of what Jonathan described sounds familiar, whether it is the cranial nerve symptoms, the dizziness and fog that no one can explain, the diagnosis that does not quite fit, please reach out. This is exactly what we do.
And if you want to go down the rabbit hole on the full journey, including the conversations from St. Augustine with Dr. Pecca and the UCC Near Me content, Jonathan says it himself: go find every episode. Start wherever you are and keep going.
Listen to the full conversation with Jonathan Morrison on the Well Connected Podcast: Live Your Life in Alignment. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Questions about Blair upper cervical chiropractic? Find us at wellconnectedchiro.com or reach out in the comments.
