10 Years on the Internet! Going With the Flow ... and Coming Full Circle!

This photo was taken in late spring 2009, by a friend I reconnected with when out to lunch with "the girls" treating me on my 49th birthday in April. An avid hiker who liked snapping pictures, 

At the time I started Lumigrate, I had come so far reversing debility. It began my first semester in the occupational therapy program. 1994, Fort Collins, Colorado. I waa 34.

I would ride home on my bicycle from class one day and feel fine, but not be able to climb the steps to the door unassisted. My health had failed in my late twenties and I recovered well, but this was different. The advantage of relapsing is you have the experience from the lapse in the past.

I would simultaneously be dissatisfied with mainstream medicine helping me as a patient in the same timeframe I was venturing into a new career in the industry. By integrating things I learned about outside mainstream with select things within, I would eventually come to see the benefit of offering a website like Lumigrate. I knew I was lucky to regain as much as I did. 

I created Lumigrate, in part, to help others find what I had worked to utilize, with good result. I also saw that my body was not going to allow my safely working with bodies as I did. Even if a healthy weight, I wasn't strong enough nor with fast movements plus balance as was needed.

So I learned how to go online and reach, teach, and finally most recently, work collaboratively with a product maker and help people find out about a new great resource. 

The circle of life on the Internet was new to me. I quietly and privately recognized Lumigrate's 10th birthday, or anniversary in the past month. I reflected on the text I received in late March 2009 while attending a presentation to the area's mental health providers by Chris Young, PhD and business partner and wife Cheryl Young about Adverse Childhood Experiences (a.k.a. ACE).

Both would have one really good thread in the Forums at Lumigrate, with my involvement, in the first year of Lumigrate. Initial content was from my local colleagues. I did foresee bringing to the mix regional and national experts. And more products. 

I never dreamed I would have input on products before hitting the market, as is the present day case.  I am editing this blog on 23 April 2019 to include the link to the website of Dis-Ease Solutions and asking you to go, explore AND if you purchase, a percentage of sales comes to me. www.diseasesolutions.net/

Then you can experience your first carefully prepared package, as I did in 2017. O'Rio was not so sure about it though. A year later, he was given to me in part due to the improvements he made doing what I knew or learned to do that reversed symptoms. It just all kept going together and I have kept going with the flow. 

The Products tab at Lumigrate has more extensive information about the creator and how we connected, and I included a photos of products.  

Two years prior to when Lumigrate launched and I reconnected at lunch with my old friend and hiking buddy, Dr. Young and I had been meeting about starting a weekly, live education group about complex, chronic fatigue and pain.

We reserved that same big room for the year, Thursdays at 4. We focused on bringing collaboration to education, services plus products provision regarding chronic fatigue and chronic pain. Our intention was as much to learn as to teach. And for providers and consumers to mix and learn together. 

We were utilizing the new model we had brainstormed in the spring of 2007, giving one hour a week to meet and plan how to go about an education group, which would be named by the participants, a "forum". By design, we wanted ownership and leadership of the group to transition to the group's members. We seeded the start by inviting a few patients that were doing well. Then I placed free ads in the local papers that had community calendars. Those attending told others in a few cases. The ripple effect.

The base concept leading to our new model came from my January 2005 meeting with an area rheumatologist, the first doctor I would market my wares to when going into my own business to provide OT services within a PT clinic within a comprehensive medical building that just opened. It was like one of those wooden Russian dolls in a way. 

I would have the model drawn up in early 2009 by an artist who came out of the blue via Facebook, at the time it was just getting popular with middle aged people. An old neighbor and friend from high school was just the right artist in the nick of time. 

I would make it the cornerstone of Lumigrate. This version is what a person in the room would see when we got underway each week in 2007 for the Fibromyalgia Forum. 

 We would take input from the participants on what local providers helped them, and I would invite those providers to come join us as guest of honor and to teach. They were welcome to come back and hear others, but none did. It was not  feasible for some to give two hours away from billable treatment time even once, let alone more.

Not one provider vi  from the building's doctors offices came. I would learn they wanted to, but losing two hours of time that could be billable.time was not possible.  They went online, at home, in their "free" time. 

The big room was reserved for us at that time EVERY WEEK until year's end.  People with chronic pain and fatigue, we knew, often had very limited support systems and we were changing that by creating the live group. We had a responsibility for continuity.

Some were using Internet website communities. And then came Facebook! I recall in 2008 looking at a group for fibromyalgia with over 12,000 people in it.  Today some groups I am in have 35,000 and are incredibly rich sources if support, information, and leads. But when doing the live group I was only aware of this, I did not use the Internet much for health info.

Despite my giving a large % of revenue to the clinic I contracted with in the building, and Dr Young's clinic having their financial collaborations with the building, we were bumped when the doctors had new software to learn before New Year. This occurred just as I had outside guest providers I had announced would be speaking there. I was miffed. But I maybe generated $20k a month. I had no clout. I was the smallest of dolls in the wooden Russian doll analogy. 

I needed a website to communicate locations, obviously. I could put highlights of the presentations on it so those who could not attend got the information. 

I wanted people to effectively and inexpensively get desired information, support, and products. I had success reversing debility in 2004 and 2005 to be as vibrant as in the photo, below. Taken at the hole in the wall restaurant and bar aforementioned where I have twice had lunch on my birthday, a decade apart. 

I wished I had the money for a website, I wondered what it would cost. The thought came to me in the opposite order, actually. A doctor had brought his video camera and tripod so I could record a forum presentation on medicating for chronic pain because they really wanted the info but could not attend due to being on call an hour away. Western Colorado was still considered rural even in our city. 40,000 received some kind of service from the building I was in, yet we were not meeting the needs for those, like me, with complex, chronic pain.

The talk was by a psychiatric nurse practitioner employed at the time by the Youngs' clinic. She had experience from California. My COTA had progressive hand therapy clinic experience from spending career time there, too. We had some great providers who moved to The Grand Valley of western Colorado to meet the demand for mainstream medical. And then I found the non mainstream presenters often moved here for personal reasons. 

I had a general idea about website costs from helping an arts nonprofit in 2004. I had bought and staffed a video and graphics studio about 1990 at my administrative liaison position for NPS and CSU in Fort Collins. Despite having g often my schedule for OT services full enough, I had not enough left after paying everyone to pay myself and there was no more space to see more patients.

The reality of the medical system in 2007 was such, you were smart to get out if you could. The clinic I was in got less space after a renegotiation, and they were to be absorbed by the overarching business that built the building and included them in 2004. I include and belabor these details as many have said to me, critically, that  I willingly left mainstream to do this online website business.

I was also critically confronted by someone who said it would have been good for me to have a "real" sickness. "Like cancer, like I had, that required surgery." I had just gotten done relating my nonsurgical times at Vail, Colorado's Steadman Clinic, getting injections into the nerve roots until new techniques were available for the surgery they foresaw could help But with much effort to find others to help, and significant funds spent, I ended up with an acceptable level of endurance and pain.

I included this as an example of how the complex chronic pain and fatigue population becomes isolated. I no longer make myself available to the person who said that to me. They are the spouse of the friend who took the photo I lead off this blog post with, a friend from 2005 until 2018, then no more. Life gets more complicated when one ventures out of the mainstream groove.

My family member in a position to coerce my. somewhat impaired father to change  the agreement established in the mid 1980s when my mother was still alive regarding their assets, without telling me they conspired secretly to do so, left me with a plan for funds after the website was up and going for monetizing it that was not to happen.

I was given enough money to live in my home another four years, pay my insurances and thankfully.get two more providers to thoroughly.carry out treatment on my neck, cranium and overall body.  A holistic dentist, and a specialized osteopath who had taught for the first 7 years of Andrew Weil's program in Arizona within the medical school. The DDS got to a key item missed before by other experts, and after, I no longer needed supplemental thyroid medication. The DO cleared up any areas affected by injury and thought the pituitary was interacting normally after. My health still had some new symptoms, but overall, I was A OK. 

So I simply proceeded with what I had the ability to do, on fumes of funds, but determined the truth must prevail and get to people, with truly ethically intended product providers.

And 10 years later, I am still here, and Lumigrate is too!  We have O'Rio Grande due to my becoming Mardy PopIns in 2014 as a result of increasing use of the website ongoing with more time needed to step through more layers on the way to true root cause and what to do about it!

And that's been a full circle for me to get around to dogs, as my parents struggled for 10 years or more with a dog business in the early years.

 Me with a big male English golden retriever, age 5ish.

Literally as I sat wishing for money for a website, unexpectedly, a check arrived from the estate of a relative who died the week of my 46th birthday. So I used it to start Lumigrate, and set myself up to keep working past mid life, utilizing my experiences as an occupational therapist and from my personal life, including lifelong health challenges. Bring the truth to people about well-being as best I can and to make it as efficient and helpful yet complete for the people I call YOUsers of Lumigrate. I began foreseeing how impaired but capable people could make some money and stay occupied by helping. They need funds for things mainstream does not financially support, from improved food to supplements and therapies. 

The simple website plan turned into a commerce and social media website because I was able to be part of starting a new cutting edge center in Grand Junction. The MD who had me record on his video camera bought the space solely and rented to those of us who wanted and could provide funds. My website would be separate and solely mine and simply provide to those wanting a virtual online purchasing experience for services including education and products.  

I had sent the first funds to the webmaster by Pay Pal, creating a Pay Pal account to do so, in November 2008. It seemed like FOREVER until it was done in March 2009.  And it cost a small fortune, which was not what was fore-seen. 5x the initially discussed estimate and 50x the initial funds transferred. I learned there are common tricks used by website builders to get you using them, then they take advantage of your noviceness in the website world.

Still, it was cheaper than brick and mortar, except I was also paying rents, routers, DSLs, phones, copier, IT experts and salaries and insurances and cell phones to be within an upstart holistic clinic and have the people power to pull it off. 

Below is the last day for me as an OTR, it turned out, and last day of internship for the powerful little gal next to me who excelled as a COTA until becoming a stay at home mom.

The guy was the COTA phenom I was fortunate to employ by including hand therapy as a service I offered via my contracting  the overall OT services in that big building I keep referring to. It served as the vase where a budding idea blossomed into a website!

I provided more neurological, behavioral, and cognitive processing therapies.  I use that expertise every day since! It is an incredible foundation for working remotely with people as I do. I am also very adept at home safety and adaptive equipment, compensatory strategies, and mobility as well as positioning. 

Del also had work hardening and occupational health experience. At the time the building had a big program for workers compensation. My OT career was complete! On to a new frontier! 

My plan had been sound, including an overview plan put together with the guidance of the local and nationally recognized business incubator center. It was relatively simple, really. Leave being a mainstream occupational therapist, help start a new center that leaned towards functional medicine and integrative medicine, put on their education series, facilitate development of the seminars I felt would do the most good online on a website I'd create. Produce them in a sensible order. Offer products that were covered in the education, to be purchased from my website. Have a blog for me to share info ongoing that w as fun and easy, and provide experts in a forums area.

Contact Us if you want. (The About tab now has the corrected info, as Contact us can't be updated until a costly updating of software in the website occurs.....). The website served well for a long time, and after ten years is essentially held together with virtual.duct tape and bailing wire. Left: Creative Director and Assistant. How she got the job, a great story!

The naming of the website to have an available URL plus a good name for our purposes long term was a big step, and took time, and a lot of money to special attorneys that didn't even exist in the city I was in far west in Colorado. Creating the logo had to be done prior to that, and coming up with a motto. Those went easily!

The logo was, unbelievably, created in one session, with a graphics artist and the creative assistant and I hovering around his monitors and collaborating. It was SO COOL to see something come to fruition like that!

Bills were paid, bookkeeping backed up and with sales ahead we needed a business manager. I knew of a former patient with the skills, but would she work for the limited amount I could pay? 

  Taken at our office building after she was married that morning. Lots to juggle.

By this time, my father had a life-changing collapse, literally and figuratively, and I'd be driving back and forth over the Rocky Mountains every week from just after Christmas until early February. Except one week in mid January when I caught a bug going around.

I'd visited at Thanksgiving, thankfully taking a friend with a new camera to master so I have this photo, below. It was the last normal time I saw my family. He asked if I needed money.  I told him I was meeting with a gal on my way back west to become my manager and bookkeeper, and I would talk to him at Christmas when I came home again.

I would do all that, except my next trip I bypassed home and went to Denver where he had been emergently taken by ambulance days before Christmas. I was super lucky the biz manager gal accepted my offer. However, she had trips and family time she wanted to do and would start mid January. I would fight to get my father a proper specialist for what I thought he had. Nobody agreed. I now realize I was in new corruption territory I had not previously experienced when an OT on a team in a hospital or skilled care facilities. It all was a mess!

 The collaborative care model, that I came to call The Lumigrate YOU! Model, was not so easily drawn and I would find a different graphics artist able to make that happen. He'd come my way in January, as if sent from "out of the blue". Again, I say, it was becoming more apparent to me that I was a veritable vessel on Earth merely needing to work hard every day doing my best, and help or the next door would open if I just got into the area where the doors were.

At times it felt like a hallway of doors everywhere and none opening. I would stress. And then, finally, one would open. 

This spiritually connected process I experience and now clearly recognize ultimately began in 2006, and continues to this day. I take solice in the 2010 Peace Fleece that was given to me by the woman I recruited to write about her Jewish faith and chronic pain.  She recruited her mother and the topics gained a fan base of their own. Sadly, their lives changed and the writing ceased after I hit the goal of being able to pay for pieces I requested.  Air Kisses was to allow all to say goodbye to one of the Forum providers who was dying of cancer.

He passed 12/21/12. Another writer announced their cancer that same time, dying in 2016, writing Each One Reach One from her death bed, which I saw on Facebook, where we had connected in 2009. She had downloaded every video we had. Got underway learning and wrote about using Lent for diet she wanted to improve. 

There were many decisions to be made I'd not foreseen. What countries did the website get to be seen on the Internet from is one that I recall well, because I just sat there reading the email from the webmaster about it and thinking "I don't know, I used to talk to people in a little clinic office in person, in Colorado, imagine serving the world!" Lumigrate was going to be just about complex chronic fatigue and pain initially, and the statistics on that would indicate about one in five people in the United States at that time would have been our "target market". That's enough for me! But when the "doctors" I asked to provide videos on pain or fatigue got distracted with other things either professionally or in their hobbies and leisure time, I initially FREAKED. And then I remember the panic feeling being replaced instantly with an "OMG" feeling when I realized that it was being guided, and was NOT to be JUST about pain and fatigue. It needed to be about more..... I basically "got the message", and insight or a message, I don't know which.

So, by then I was already far enough into the process that the idea of having a website that served everyone was not overwhelming and was within the grasp of my 50-ish year old mind. Remember, I was merely an occupational therapist who had an idea to help more people. I grew up with an 8 party line and a black phone with a dial and a cord to the wall. I got super lucky on finding a fantastically talented woman with good base skills who was willing to get the education with me on everything from lighting for video, to photo and video editing. We got very, very sidetracked by the clinic's seminar series needing to be put on by my business initially, they were simply struggling to get off the ground serving patients. But we took the time and did the right thing, and got the Constant Contact put together (after learning how -- all of this via a $65/hour teacher). The computer and software and lines and routers and installers ended up being about $20,000. And after fifteen months, once she was proficient at what we learned, we needed either sales and income, or more funds from my sources. Which did not come to be. So I had to lay her off just after Independence Day 2009.  This was one of the hardest weeks of my life. It reminded me of my initial years in college before I had learning disability therapy when I dreaded going to a test because I knew I was going to do poorly. I hated spending so much to train a loyal person and have them go on, but relished in the moment I saw her connect to a profound concept while we recorded Dr. Paula King's invited presentation on resistance to change. 

Failure is not fun. I started selling furniture and items I did not need, and this would continue into 2015. The bed I'd bought in hopes my father would come stay with me in winters and get medical attention in the building I'd contracted occupational therapy services within, or the new group I helped get off the ground at the new center was the first thing to be sold, to a close friend. In moving it out the door, we had to make a 90 degree turn and I was following. I hit my breaking point and said "that money I had, I could have bought a house, but nooooo, I had to do something creative and to help people....". My friend set his end of the bed down as he got to the door, looking at the floor midway between us and said: "Maahdy.... you had a good idea. It's still a good idea. It will always be a good idea. Now pick it up and don't quit." He meant the bed, but I think it was a metaphor for me with Lumigrate.

 Amber was what he and I both thought of for her as a name when this 10 pound teacher came to me on Thanksgiving 2009 as a foster kitten. She would be inexplicably crazed at times and be euthanized as dangerous in mid April 2013. I learned posthumously from German MD teaching his method of medicine her root cause was mercury sensitivity plus exposures .... Same for me. Then same for O'Rio and with THREE times I dug in to study. And that's maybe why I am here now able to do as I am today! I joke I am not dead, in a wheelchair, or assisted living but.... seriously...

 others are! So.....just sayin'!

The election of 2008 closed a loophole for online sales tax in Colorado and Amazon announced they'd not do business with Colorado businesses. And we were collecting information on what products were looked at from the products tab at Lumigrate by using Amazon products, which would give a little "click through" income.

And those are just the highlights that apply to the website as you see it today, or as I see it today as I write this blog. Initially I blogged the way the teacher told me -- on a regular basis and about little chit chat fun stuff. I'd figure out that when people come to the website finding it from Search words, they might explore the blog tab, so I started making the blogs few and far between but about HIGHLIGHTS.

So today I provide this highlight of our formative times and an overview of what's happened since. And most importantly, how I've helped a NEW website come to be, and how we are working COLLABORATIVELY, not competitively!

The initial group of providers at the center did not stick together long. It actually benefitted the consumers, I'd finally see, and came to my peace with it. However, that's not easy to do when your income was relying upon the plan we'd agreed upon. Many say I should have had more things in writing, but in my experience those things just add to disagreement and don't make anything come out better. Things are going to take their courses and we might 'intend' something but reality will come about differently. So Go With The Flow.

I'd use Facebook (which was $0) to reach other providers and consumers around the US and beyond. I'd ask some to write in the forums, and that would bring more views. More views would allow me to get providers, or eventually product companies, advertising (or similar) income. I'd learn a lot, same as the initial group locally. I look back now and see that I had to learn the lessons, and go on with the flow, and I'd eventually get to the CLEAR waters with up and coming, fresh people who could use my support and what I have to offer with my skills and Lumigrate's longevity and reach on the Internet.

Since 2015, the main place for readers to find threads on Lumigrate have been in a forum about Facebook or social media / Internet sources. In 2016 I'd find a very intriguing product maker who was going to have a website by the fall, and I opted to collaborate. And they had the delays and learning curve as I had experienced. Only more so! In 2017 I'd learn the numbers on how many people have a sensitivity to trace amounts of common elements that end up in products, and how that was the root cause of my health issues, and O'Rio's. I'd adopt O'Rio in the fall of 2017 and be able to work with the product person on pet products, and products for active people as inspired by a pelvic PT who, ironically, was the very last local provider to register with Lumigrate years ago.

They say it's harder to tread water than to swim. I agree. And so I've been treading, and going with the flow for a seemingly astounding long time to me. I'm an Aries, after all. The computer arrived just before my 48th birthday, and I just had my 59th about a week ago. This was not what I'd fore-seen for my 50s, certainly, but I suspect some day I'll say I wouldn't trade it for anything. So today, I got back into the "saddle", so to speak. The product producer's website is thought to go live any moment now. I know how that was with Lumigrate -- we had a launch party with food and drinks and people invited and .... it went live about a week later. But we got access to show it off, as it was, for those hours. It was very exciting. I could not imagine what all was going to be entailed to get to this point, it has been a lot in 10 years. Older, wiser, experienced in many things. 

I've come to realize new websites are like children. They are born, they crawl, toddle, walk, then run. If they live long enough, they grow up and start making money. And it may take half the time or the full time a person does. I guess it was a good thing I started at 48! Today, at 59, I feel like a nervous grandmother waiting to learn of the birth of a grandchild. I hope that any of my old followers who read this appreciate the recollections I've shared. I hope any new followers who read this appreciate what will be posted next, and after that, and so on.

The news broke today that Julian Assange was arrested. Interesting timing. Our rights having been infringed upon if not violated if attempting to bring truth to the forefront is a big factor in the difficulties with getting funding to make Lumigrate 'do more good for more people'. I waited to see if consumers would get "on board" in enough numbers to do the financial support needed. The problem is Lumigrate is providing key information that benefits people who literally do not have money to spare on a website subscription.

And so, TEN YEARS LATER, I'm finally back where I started, with products being suggested, for which I will get some compensation for sales that result. The product provider is also doing consultations, except this time, like me, there's NO "D" after their name! Yes, one of the most helpful guides for helping those in a bind (no pun intended) with their health is with an early education in plants, park rangering, and bar tending .... and, same as me, losing wellness and figuring out how to get it back!

And so, without further elaborations, I will leave off here and end with this quote: "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so free your very existence is an act of rebellions." -- Albert Camus