Don

I started coming to Congruent because I’d been having a lot of back pain, this had been going on for 5+ years. I wrote it up as getting old. I’m 52 now, I just thought this was the way it was going to be, I’m going to have aches and pains everywhere… at that time my knees hurt, my shoulders hurt, my back hurt. My back got so bad that when I would lay down it would be very painful. When I would try to get out of bed it would be very painful. It’d loosen up after moving around during the day but it got to the point that even when I was walking at work I’d get sharp pains that would make we want to fall down.

I knew I had to do something. I wasn’t one at the time that necessarily believed in extended care. I have a hard time getting myself to the doctor, I have to be super sick. My mindset at the time was that I just needed to be “straightened out”. After the 3rd or 4th session, my back was feeling 10x better. After the 4th adjustment, I could literally jump out of bed, run down the stairs to let the dog out… I hadn’t done that in 5 years because my body hurt that much. I didn’t know that it didn’t have to hurt. I was extremely impressed by that. It allowed me to get back into the gym and be more active, I ended up losing 25 lbs over the first 3 months of care because I was able to actually do things again that I hadn’t thought I could do anymore. It’s made my life more enjoyable. I have a grandson and I am able to play with him now. I can keep up with my teenagers and goof around with them, doing things that I thought were just out of the picture for me.

Before care, I had mentally accepted that I just wouldn’t be able to do the things I really enjoyed anymore. I found other things that I was able to do so I could enjoy my life, but it wasn’t things that I really liked to do. My whole life I had been very active. I played every sport I could growing up and into my young adult life. Seeing that deteriorate was depressing.

It was very invigorating and quite frankly surprising when I started feeling so much better and I realized “holy cow, it doesn’t have to be like this, this isn’t normal to feel like this”… because I thought it was. My biggest realization was that I didn’t have to be in pain all the time and give up all the things that I enjoy doing because of it. When I take new roles at work, I don’t feel as stressed as I used, I can mentally handle stress better now. I don’t worry about “if I go play pickle ball or golf, am I going to be in pain for a long time and throw my back out”.

I was feeling amazing, I was finally able to do the things I love again and get back to having an active lifestyle… but life got busy. I got real busy at work and I told myself that I didn’t have the time anymore for chiropractic care since I was “fixed”. At the time, I wasn’t in the mode that I needed to continue to come if I wanted to continue to feel this good… UNTIL those little things started coming back. They started coming back slowly. I was in a role at work where I was traveling on airplanes all the time, I wasn’t eating good or exercising… I fell back into my old routine and of course my back started giving me problems again. I knew exactly what I needed to do before I got back into the condition I was in before I ever came to CLC in the first place. When I came back to Congruent the second time around, I had a different mindset coming in. I knew I needed to take a serious look at keeping some sort of chiropractic routine going long term to maintain all my progress and health. I knew a consistent routine of adjustments would allow me to live the life that I want, the longest that I can, and that’s very important to me.