I Hurt My Back

2 Comments December 13, 2016 drworobec

I hurt my back last Thursday.

I have never had a back injury. Like, never. I’ve hurt my neck, broken my thumb, sprained my ankles, and torn my ACL, but my back has never given me problems. As a chiropractor, perhaps this is to be expected, but in fact, the opposite is true. Many of my colleagues decided to join this profession after having great success with chiropractic for their own back injuries, and many others now suffer with lower back pain as a result of the physical nature of what we do. But for me, despite two babies, 225lb deadlifts, and a clumsy fall-down-often nature, my lower back had been spared. Until Thursday.

Thursdays are my GSD day (Get Sh** Done). I don’t have clinic hours that day, so my day often begins at the gym and ends at the grocery store, doing computer work, or cleaning my house. This past Thursday, I was with my 9am crew working on back squats. It was a 12-minute working segment; one back squat per minute for 12 minutes, with progressively increasing weight. On minute six, I lost my focus. I didn’t concentrate on my core, or my breath, and I heard a “click” from my back on the way down to the bottom of my squat. I didn’t have pain immediately, but it’s not my first rodeo, and I knew exactly what I’d done. I let my competitive ego take over, finished the workout, and then called the clinic.

I was in a treatment room less than two hours after that dreaded “click” and by then, I couldn’t even stand up straight. But Dr. Dave worked his magic, and when I left thirty minutes later I was feeling almost 100%. Through the weekend, my back pain came and went, but with some heat, core stability exercises, hot yoga, and a great Sunday long run, I am back to full function and pain free today. Five days from start to finish; from hunched and bent forward in pain to a full deadlift workout at 6am this morning. Chiropractic works. That treatment set me up on a path of quick healing.

I’ve written about low back pain before, but this is the first time I had been on the other side of the coin. This experience has grown my empathy and expanded my amazement with the wonders of my “job.” It comes down to mechanics, and if we can fix your mechanics, we can get you out of pain and functioning optimally. Quickly.

Little Girls and Big Cities

Leave a comment November 29, 2016 drworobec

I am finding that raising a little girl is different than raising a little boy. I am finding that raising kids in a city is different than raising kids in a small town. And I am discovering both of these things fast and furiously as I venture into the realm of two school-aged children.

Let’s talk about the gender factor first. My four-year-old daughter is now coming home from Junior Kindergarten using phrases like “best friend,” “she said she didn’t want to play with me,” and “hurt my feelings.” These are all phrases that her brother, three years older, has never spoken. She feels things deeply, she notices friendship nuances, she’s finding her way amongst her peers.

And the big-city versus small-town element, well, this is something that I’ve written about before. I’m a small town girl, and I was raised in a town of 250 people until I was ten years old and we moved to a town of 2000 people. Everyone knew everyone, for the good or the bad, so it seems unnatural to me to send my children into a classroom, knowing few other families, and having them talk about kids that I’ve never met.

Now, to be fair, we moved into this neighbourhood less than two years ago; we’re still finding our way and meeting people as we go. But I suspect that this not-knowing-everyone is simply a side effect of city living, even though my kids attend a school of just 300 students, small by city standards. So, while there are more and more familiar faces at pick-up and drop-off, and more and more hellos at the playground gate, the fact remains that I want to know my children’s friends and their families.

I was chatting about these things with a friend; this friend lives in a different neighbourhood and has children that are older than mine. She’s been down this road before, and like the good friend she is, she sent her parenting wisdom down the motherhood pipeline: she suggested that I host a friend party for my daughter. Now, why oh why, I hadn’t come up with this simple solution on my own accord is one of the reasons I often preach that “The World Needs More Girlfriends.” Girlfriends help and support, and help and support she did.

A friend party it would be.

We printed off eleven invitations, one for each girl in her class, and asked her teacher to put them into the children’s backpacks. “We’d like to get to know you,” the invites said, “please join us on Sunday afternoon.” So, this past weekend I had six little girls running around my basement, laughing and playing and building their friendships. And I had six families in my kitchen, meeting and talking and building their community.

This friend party was for her, but as it turned out, it was also for me. You see, she’s nurturing relationships with girls that she’ll go to school with for the next decade and beyond (girls like this and this), and I’m nurturing relationships to build my small town within my big city.

Passion

2 Comments November 14, 2016 drworobec

I talk (write) a lot about passion. I’m an emotional person, so I think it stands to reason that I have many passions for many things. That’s always been the essence of my blog; passion. Authenticity. Genuineness. Transparency.

When I started this blog in May 2012 (234 posts ago!) my reasoning was that I wanted patients to learn about the real me. As a chiropractor, my profession is very much based on trust, and I want my patient base to understand who I am as a person, which will hopefully help them to understand who I am as a practitioner. I think I’ve done that. I’ve bared my soul here, week upon week, Tuesday upon Tuesday, draft upon draft, post upon post. My audience has grown exponentially, and I now have several hundred of you following along weekly, liking (or not liking), sharing, discussing, and helping to spread my words through the tangled mess of the internet. WordPress, the host of this site, regularly sends me readership data, and many Tuesdays I get a notification that says “your stats are booming.” These alerts are satisfying, because they mean that I’m engaging my audience and making people think. And the fact that you’re thinking about topics that come from my passion is the whole point.

But I’ve decided to take a step back.

You see, I’m noticing that words are becoming harder for me to find. My posts are not writing themselves, in my dreams and on my runs and on my yoga mat, as they once did. I feel like my passion on this blog is being diluted and that defeats my entire purpose. My purpose here is passion.

So my posts are going to shift slightly, ever so slightly, to maintain that high degree of passion that’s so very important to me. This isn’t meant to be just another blog, not just another health-tips site, not just another social media tool. Not to me, anyway. This is meant to be me, online. I’m not here to drum up business, I’m not here to grow my Facebook Page, I’m not here to grab page views and link clicks. I’ve built this online platform as much for me as I have for you, and so I must keep my standards high. I want to be proud of each and every post and make my honesty and authenticity and yes, passion, glaringly apparent through your screens. “I love your blogs,” someone said to me this weekend, and I hope she meant “I love your passion,” because that’s my end-game.

For now, instead of a new post every Tuesday, you’re going to get one every second Tuesday. Not a big shift, perhaps, but a big shift for me, and a recognition that taking a small step back doesn’t mean failure or quitting, labels I’d previously imposed upon myself; it simply means adaptability and not-going-to-settle and hopefully, excellence.

Today you get post #235. I hope you like it, and I hope you understand my reasoning. Thank you for your support thus far, and I plan to keep writing with passion well into the years ahead.

***And if you’ve missed some of my passion over the years, here are my favourites:

Come With Me.

She was there.

Make the trade.

Blizzards and Accomplishments

What they Wish they Would’ve Done

April, May, June

The Search for Skinny

Break the Silence

Sarah Happened

I am a Chiropractor.