I have told this story many times. In interviews, in seminars, in patient consultations, in quiet conversations with people who needed to hear that someone else had been where they were standing. And I will never stop telling it. Because as long as I have breath in my lungs, this story is the reason I do what I do.
October 27th, 2007 was the day of my first Blair upper cervical correction. And October 27th, 2017, ten years later, was the day I sat down to record this episode. A decade of more passion every single day than I had the day before. For someone who, for most of her life, couldn't finish much of anything, that is not a small thing.
So let me take you back to the beginning.
Christmas Eve, 1982
I was two years old and nine months when my mother left. She walked out on Christmas Eve and didn't come back. She left me, my brother, and my father in a little Iowa house, and that was the last we saw of her for a very long time.
That is the earliest trauma I can name. And even though it was not a physical injury, that psychological abandonment has shaped everything about who I am and how I move through the world. It still does.
My dad was left with two toddlers and very little capacity to handle it. He was doing the best he could, and I believe that now. But he was overwhelmed and emotionally under-equipped, and we ended up living with his parents on and off for most of my childhood. Before I turned eleven years old, I had called six different women "mom." My dad kept trying, kept bringing new relationships into our lives, kept making choices out of desperation. And one lady after another, it didn't work.
There was not a lot of stability. There was not a lot of emotional safety. And there was physical abuse in some of those homes that I don't need to detail here except to say: my body was keeping score long before I knew that was a thing.
The First Attempt
By the time I was in junior high, I had depression. Not the kind people use loosely to describe a bad week. The heavy, relentless, pull-you-under kind. And at thirteen years old, I tried to end my life for the first time.
I am telling you this because I think it is important to be honest about how bad it was. We see kids on social media who are suffering, kids who are bullied and broken and desperate, and we grieve that no one knew or no one intervened. I was that kid. And my plan didn't work, which is the only reason I am here to tell you this story.
By the time I was twenty, I had attempted several more times. I was diagnosed with bipolar 2 rapid cycling and put on lithium, Effexor, and an antipsychotic. I had a psychotic break and spent about two weeks in a psychiatric facility. My daughter, who was a toddler, was cared for by friends while I was inside.
I want to name her here, because she is the reason I kept getting up. Every single time the thoughts came, her face came first. I knew that if I left, she would grow up carrying what I had carried. I could not do that to her. She is the reason the attempts never fully succeeded. She is the reason I kept looking for another answer.
Palmer College and the Slow Climb
When I was twenty-one, a friend's mother gave me a part-time job checking in patients at Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa. I had grown up in Davenport, the birthplace of chiropractic, and somehow had never really connected with the profession. But in that front desk job, watching people come in not feeling well and leave with a smile on their face, something in me woke up.
I started getting regular chiropractic care. It was traditional full-spine chiropractic, not Blair upper cervical, but it helped my nervous system enough that I was eventually able to come off my psychiatric medication. That was significant. The medication had made me feel like a zombie. I gained weight. I couldn't concentrate. Getting off it helped.
But the heaviness never fully left. I still woke up every day with an overwhelming sense of not wanting to be alive. I just had more reasons to keep going than I had had before.
The student doctors and staff at Palmer kept telling me I had what it took to become a chiropractor. I didn't believe them. I was terrified of the debt, the boards, the level of commitment required. I had never finished anything. I was a single mother. Who was I to think I could become a doctor?
But one day at a time, I got my prerequisites done. And in November 2004, I enrolled in the doctorate program at Palmer.
Almost There and Still Falling Apart
By my seventh and eighth trimester, a year away from graduating, I was in crisis again.
The depression had come back with full force. Suicidal thoughts were constant. I was talking about it with friends, asking for help, wondering if I should go back on medication or drop out and go back into day treatment. I had student loans in the hundreds of thousands. I was close to the finish line and I was losing faith in everything, including myself.
My best friend and study partner, Jackie Newhouse, listened to everything. She had been beside me through the hardest stretches of school and she knew exactly where I was. And one day she gave me an ultimatum.
She said: "I've heard about Blair upper cervical chiropractic. We learned about it in fourth trimester. You have not tried it. If you don't go get this done, I'm not going to be your friend anymore."
I did not want to lose Jackie. I could not get through the last year of chiropractic school without her. So I did what she told me.
I reluctantly submitted myself to the student doctor and the staff doctor at Palmer and I told them everything. Every physical trauma. Every chemical exposure. Every psychological wound. Because I understood enough about chiropractic by then to know that the three things that cause the body to go out of alignment are thoughts, traumas, and toxins. And I had a litany of all three.
October 27th, 2007
Dr. Hubbard read my X-rays. He told me later that an untrained eye might have looked at my imaging and said the alignment didn't look real. But he saw exactly what was wrong. He pushed and tested and found it: a very significant upper cervical misalignment at the atlas, the bone at the very top of the spine.
He had a student doctor named Kevin Leach perform the adjustment. And on that table, in that moment, my life changed.
Instantly.
The heaviness lifted. The cloud of depression, the weight of suicidal thoughts, the dull gray film that had been over my world since I was thirteen years old, it lifted. In an instant.
I heard sounds more clearly. I saw colors more brightly. I had an awareness of being in my body that I had never experienced before in my life.
I got up off the table and said: "What did you do?"
I must have said it in a tone that startled them, because they looked at me with wide eyes. I burst into tears and tried to explain what had happened, what I was feeling, and all they could do was smile.
I felt hope for the first time in my life. Real hope. Not the kind you talk yourself into. The kind that arrives and you know, instantly, that something has changed at the root.
My Daughter Has a Mom
I went home and I enrolled in the Blair upper cervical elective that was offered on campus. I learned the technique. I graduated. I became a doctor. I built a practice. I got married. I had two more daughters.
None of that happens without that adjustment.
I know that. I say it plainly because it is the truth: my daughter Lauren has a mother because of the correction I received on October 27th, 2007. My husband has a wife. My younger daughters exist. I am here.
Whether it would have been my own hand or the recklessness of a life lived in that much pain, I would not have survived. I know that in my bones.
And that is why, ten years later and every day since, I walk into my office with more passion than the day before. Because when I sit across from someone who is suffering, who has been suffering for years and has lost hope that anything can help, I understand that moment in a way that most people cannot. I have been in it. I know the weight of it. And I know what is possible on the other side.
What This Work Is Really About
I go deep in my patient consultations. I ask about the physical history, yes. But I also ask about the emotional history, the chemical history, the psychological experiences that shaped a person's nervous system long before they walked through my door.
I do that because I know what it means to finally be in a room with someone who actually listens. Who doesn't rush through the intake form and move on. Who understands that a body does not become dysfunctional in isolation. It becomes dysfunctional in the context of a whole life.
BJ Palmer said that chiropractic specific is everything and chiropractic general is nothing. I am living proof of that. I had been under traditional chiropractic care for years before my Blair correction. It helped me. But it did not heal me. It took a trained eye looking at the right place in exactly the right way, specific imaging, specific analysis, a specific correction, to do what nothing else had been able to do.
There are approximately 100 Blair chiropractors in the world. I know that is not enough. Changing that is one of my most important missions. Every student I train, every seminar I teach, every doctor I encourage toward this work, is another person who will carry this forward into lives and families I will never meet.
I breed hope. That is what I do. And I will never stop.
Listen to the full episode on the Well Connected Podcast: Live Your Life in Alignment. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
If you are struggling and need someone who understands, reach out. We are at wellconnectedchiro.com. And if you are not near Southern California, I can help you find a Blair chiropractor near you.
If you or someone you love is in crisis, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
