7 Years Ago to Now ... It Comes Together!

I woke up this morning a little later than I wanted to -- I sleep with an 'intermission' these days and last night's intermission found me getting up to make something to eat after finishing a wonderful book titled Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything by Geneen Roth.  So Rock Cesario's "Acoustic Sunday" radio show on local radio station "Drive 105" was underway, but the lure of someone having brought me Gevalia yesterday had me enticed.  I struggle with caffeine addiction the way other people struggle with other things -- I correct that -- 'coffee addiction', not caffeine, as there is caffeine in green tea and it doesn't get me inspired to get up the way 'coffee's on!' does!

Light You Up with the Ghost of Johnny Cash, a new album by Sean Mullins is playing right now.  I'm not sure if I spelled that name right, but I'm sure Rock will know.  He likely wouldn't know how to spell 'fibromyalgia' either, but he is now going to be learning more about it SOON because he and one of his childhood pals, Dr Chris Young, have both JUMPED AT the chance to record a podcast together with me about music related to pain and health. On facebook, I refer to Rock as my "Minister of Music" as I truly revolve my Sunday plans around listening to the show from 9 am to noon.  He likely vaguely remembers me not looking quite as 'healthy' as I do now, back when he met me right after I moved here, and due to my limitations with sitting and activity 'commitment', I had to do some explaining, as I still do -- best to be honest and not have shame about your medical condition, I feel. 

Once on facebook on a Sunday, my graphics artist, who is a Christian, saw that and Commented a big YES!!!, because he thought I'd gone to church!  Well, I had, if you define 'church' the way I do.  I just stayed home and did it my own spiritual way, which is different than his but it provides for good discussions I hope we both learn and grow from.

Before Lumigrate went 'live' in March of 2009, which happily has changed my life forever (not in all ways 'good', but the good FAR outweighs the bad!), I would get up and read the paper and listen, then start puttering around cleaning up for the week, starting laundry and then after the station went back to it's normal ROCK format, I'd start running the dishwasher, washing machine, vacuum .... then end with dusting in the good afternoon sun that would be streaming in my then. 

Having made a decent 'recovery' from a bad case of fibromyalgia that started long before I moved here 7 years ago, I'm just so grateful to be able 'to do again', but more recently I'm having to go back to adapting how I do things due to not having taken good enough care of myself in the last year; I did well considering the circumstances, but I'm having to heal and repair.  I believe my cranial sacral system is letting me know about it too, and back problems have me sticking close to home the last month, which includes vertigo from the top vertebrae and TMJ issues -- TMJ and balance/vertigo are very connected I'm being reminded.  It's time to finally invest in some treatment about unfortunately; I broke some teeth this summer clenching in my sleep, not having been told by my former (key word here) dentist that I needed a guard if I was not grinding but 'just' clenching, since my molars are particularly 'deep'. 

So when you look at that model of YOU and your providers, I'm inclined to ask the artist to put 'dentist' on one of those so I remember it more!  So, once again, no winter vacation for me most likely.  It's been since 1995, when I had fibromyalgia come on when I was in OT school, that I've had a vacation at ALL, no matter what summer.  But I'm fortunate to live in one of the most beautiful states in the USA, which is a good country to live in overall aside from the health care system currently, and I have lots and lots of friends to go visit and catch up with when I have the time and feel up to the driving.   "Luckily" the Front Range's top TMJ dentist expert moved here to Grand Junction about the same time I moved from there, and he just presented at CEUs at the regional medical center and opened MY MIND UP about breathing and health issues from childhood.  And yes, he agreed to participate with education on Lumigrate, and will do a wonderful podcast too, I'm sure.  Another week, the head of CEUs for Kaiser Permanente presented and he is about my age and is a musician in Denver and agreed to participate with education on Lumigrate as well, so I'm guessing we're going to be having him Skype into the podcast studio and talk music with Chris and Rock, or 'Rocky' as Chris calls him. 

So today I thought I'd write a little about how Rock and I know each other here in Grand Junction, Colorado.  Seven years ago in early December I drove over the Continental Divide on Interstate-70 in my Nissan Altima, which my boyfriend called my 'granny car' powerfully gripping the road or ice with Bridgestone Blizzaks -- I used to work in driving rehab and am the daughter of a 'tire guy' so I put money into the safety aspects -- tires, brakes, wipers. That, and I was a passenger in a car crash or rear ending on ice with every single adult I ever spent much time with up until my mid 20s, when interestingly enough I spent 7 years on a motorcyle or in a truck or car with a man driving most of the time who had seizure disorder.  No events then or since, and thankfully never when I am driving, with the exception of a deer that collided with me a few years ago -- that was the end of the Altima! I went to Toyotas with a little higher profile and I previously wrote a blog about my tires on that vehicle this summer. 

So in early December of 2003 when I arrived here, I was tired; it was a 7 hour drive from Colorado Springs with lots of melted snow and ice being thrown in the air filled with 'mag-chloride' mixed with the oils on the road -- my gold car was brown and had icesickles that looked kind of like eyelashes on the front. Hard to see your way around streets and find your way around town and make a good impression at your 'job' with a car that looks like that, but I saw the LaQuinta right there that my company was putting me at.  To their credit, they put the area manager there too when she came to town, in the past the company I worked sent me to Junction 'for two weeks' that turned into two months while they hired someone from out of state, and they put me at the Holiday Inn and their manager at the Sheraton, which offended me.  Therapists are the ones those companies 'make their money off the backs of' and here I am with fibromyalgia and you won't put my aching back in the BEST BED in town?  They got after me for my dinner expenses (I was eating gluten free, in 1997 -- not easy, so I was going to restaurants that served fish and rice and vegetables.  I asked them if they'd rather I go 'home'.  They let me keep turning in receipts for real food.)

I drove downtown looking for a car wash without brushes on it and this LOVELY downtown district, lit up for the Holidays, was without any traffic! It wasn't freezing cold either, just cold.  There was, in retrospect, literally a 'fairy dust' feel in the air.  I found the facility I was to report to the next day and went to the hotel, checked in and called in some takeout from an Italian restaurant I saw nearby.  I hadn't counted on being at a hotel that didn't have actual glasses and I went around with the bartender at the restaurant about buying a wine glass from them -- they couldn't figure out how to put that in their system so I promised to come back when they offered to just give me a glass. (good marketing... they were nice to me and I was on an expense account!)

I knew the facility was wanting a permanent OTR and they were having troubles filling the slot, which is never a 'good sign'.  But I really liked the manager when I met her the next morning and actually had a 'click' that I now know means I've met someone who is going to change my life's direction, but is just there as a temporary redirector, not a permanent or necessarily 'easy' way.  It turns out the facility had been very good in years past but was going down the tubes at the time, which has to do with the top management, ideally.  The only traveling OTR I knew in the whole country called me that day to say his company was offering him an assignment in Grand Junction, so I knew that if I wanted the job I had to speak up FAST.  So I talked it over with my long-time beau in Colorado Springs, which was more like telling him I felt I needed to  move, and was thrilled when they agreed to pay my moving costs and give me a hefty raise.  Then they backed down on the raise when they found out how much I was making in Colorado Springs and we compromised. 

The next weekend the beau came to visit and took me around to look at places to rent, and surprised me when on Monday when I was at work, he also rented a place -- a downtown loft a block of of Main Street, right by a park to walk 'his' dog; "Scooter the Wonder Dog" had been my therapy dog in facilities in Colorado Springs. Since they were 'retired' and had all day to walk around downtown and he was a musician in his retirement, they met Rock by going into his incense-filled store downtown.  I can't be around the stuff, but I did pop my head in once and was introduced.  We were founding members of a very successful non profit in Colorado Springs and I wanted to create for myself a similar social structure as I enjoyed in Colorado Springs, and saw in the newspaper a non-profit called FOKE: Friends of Kulture and Entertainment in the Grand Valley, which was putting on a concert.  So I went, and offered to volunteer -- just taking tickets or money or whatever, but they had space on their board and 'a woman would likely be a good addition'. 

Just like the facility not being able to find an OTR, it probably isn't a good thing when a non-profit has a newcomer plug into the board.  Rock was on the board though -- he was the ballast to the group, which had a lot of egotistical men in my opinion, which is not a BAD THING, except they met at 7 am and ... I am not normally getting UP at 7 am, let alone being downtown in a cold cafe for a meeting to deal with business-type egos -- I liked the 'artsy people' like in Colorado Springs, probably because they balanced ME OUT.  Organizations with good teams need balance.  And I likely could have balanced FOKE, but I wasn't feeling well and was overextended with work and just wasn't up for it back then.  I resigned, and soon after FOKE was put on 'hold' due to the difficulties of expenses to do with bringing in music. The website I was suggesting was imperative to any organization's viability to FREE get ahold of people they collect email addresses from interested people was turning into a $3,000 website due to the preferances of FOKE's founder, who had high standards for his pursuits.  But I didn't want to kick in hundreds of my own dollars -- I was already donating my time and experiences from having helped form a nonprofit that was financially succesful in it's first year! But I am proud to have served for a while because everyone says the group did a lot for the arts in this little town in the high desert of western Colorado midway between Denver, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah.

But I adore ALL of the people who were on the board, and am always happy to see them -- it just wasn't a functional group for ME at that time, but I secretly wish that someday it gets dusted off and tried again.  The facility I was working at also wasn't a good place for me and I them, and at about a year I was forming my own company, Mardy Ross, OTR LLC and providing therapy services in the Primary Care Partners Building in The Physical Therapy Specialty Center in the Garden Level. Behavioral Health and Wellness, which Chris and Cheryl Young co-own, is on the second/top floor.  I joked that I'm the only OT dumb enough to go into a business that excludes my discipline in the title ... but the owner didn't THINK OF THAT, 20 years before when he started his company, which had 20 employees at the time I joined them.  He provided me good guidance on what to name my business -- he said 'people are going to know you as YOU, Mardy, not a name'.  So now I'm having to meld "Lumigrate" and "Mardy Ross" in people's minds and link it all up on the Internet, including facebook.  It's a lot, but it's interesting to do, so I'm not complaining! 

I also joke that I lost so much weight doing the stairs going up to talk with Chris Young, which wasn't the truth because most of the time I took the elevator as back then I was prone to tripping and falling a lot.  What actually happened was that my massage therapist saw a mass on my throat which was my thyroid getting enlarged .. 'building a bigger engine' as my doctor described it at the time.  Course, I'd just BEEN to him the weeks before as I was required quarterly appointments at that time, and he hadn't seen it, touched me.  He is now a 'former doctor' and fortunately Dr Rollins, who you see in the videos and Forum writings on Lumigrate related to hypothyroidism came to be known to me through my asking the only compounding pharmacy here at the time for a suggested provider.  And the rest, as they say 'is history'!

The PT clinic had just moved into the big, new, fancy medical building and also snagged up an amazing OTR, CHT (certified hand therapist) who had a patient from a rheumatologist right off the bat. So I went to meet Dr Peter Shane and his staff, who POUNCED ON ME when I went to their office to let them know that I was doing general OT there -- home safety, brain boosting activities, medication management strategies, and generally, the occupation of health care management.  "What I need is a clinic in this town to handle patients with fibromyalgia -- the doctors send them to me and it's not really a rheumatologic condition so I can't do anything for them, but what they need is: .................."

......... And he went on to basically plant the seed of what I would then take partly to fruition with Chris Young (who co-developed the You model on our home page with me a couple of years later after we saw our patients we collaborated on doing SO WELL.  And then I saw that I could be helping LOTS more people by having a website about what I was doing in that lovely, fancy, new medical building.  So THAT is the 'story' of how we are all connected and now, three years since I started having the idea for what you now see as Lumigrate.com, it's a PLEASURE to be integrating and weaving Chris and Rock together with plans to then do a follow up with someone from Denver who in his day job is head of CEUs for Kaiser Permanente.  Not only did I learn from HIS presentation, I have a hunch his organization will have something to learn from Lumigrate.com, and I look forward to seeing what that is, just as I do with Chris' and Rock's businesses and people around them. 

Because really, it's all about who we know, and feeling connected.  So the most exciting thing this week that I have to report here is that Aimee Shannon's officially 'on' as an administrator on the Group page on facebook currently titled "Lumigrate: Fibromyalgia Health Education and Counseling".  !!!!!

As a LSW (Licensed Social Worker) and having been fortunate to have a job with disability insurance when she was working in child protective services investigations, she brings a unique set of abilities with her, some of which have to do with her professional training and mostly which has to do with her innate abilities that likely made her VERY GOOD at what she used to do 'for a living' (her vocation).  Now one of her occupations is being an activist and educator about fibromyalgia, when she is able and up to it, related to fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue.  Lumigrate provides, as it does for me (which was part of my creating it), the luxury of working when you can and then we just set things up so there are not expectations and responsibilities that interfere with the more important occupation she has, which is to manage her health and life with a chronic and serious, debilitating medical reality right now.  

The other important things I'd like to update people on is generally that I continue to speak with people interested in having a place with Lumigrate in "sponsorship" or being included on "Mardy's List", in addition to more people coming forward who can provide content in the forums area.  I am working to be selective about that and keep our standards and content level what it is, with progressive and valid information presented in a streamlined way and mixing in some FUN along the way. 

I hope if you've read this piece you feel included in the history of what Lumigrate 'is'.  I'm trying to keep those interested for whatever reasons 'in the loop' -- and some people are new to knowing about Lumigrate, others have been aware of us since 'day one' and like to keep up with the news. 

This past week, I had photographs of me taken to go into the new 'landing page' for Lumigrate.com and for the podast area on TalkingDigital's podcast area.  These are been created by the graphics artist who did the You model and Full Barrel Syndrome graphic for our launch, Greg Mann of 'Son of Mann' in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greg's working on making them look 'to his quality level', and this is his busy season and he, like all of us, end up with glitches that seem to make things take three times longer than you'd think.  But as long as we are ALL in the same 'slipstream' as I call it -- we're good. 

The website is ready for a 'facelift' and update of things, such as having a tab for podcasts instead of having them listed in with the Forums as I've been able to do on my own.  I'm in the process of preparing to hand the website and marketing 'work' over to others again, because I can't get enough of the 'integration of content' done, along with managing the blah blah blah biz aspects of things.  (I studied business right out of high school and was the administrative liaison of a government project with a multi million dollar budget from my mid 20s to early 30s and just 'am over it', but it's a 'necessary evil', like 'taking your medicine'. 

Born in the USA, by Bruce Springstein just came on .... brings back fond, fond memories of my Front Range, go to BIG concerts Rock 'n' Roll days and friends and family then who are long gone from my life, as it is half a lifetime ago and half a state away now.  But I'm going to spend half an hour picking up the pieces of my 'life' around the office/home and remember fondly the old days when work wasn't available to me 24/7.  But it is an honor to have Lumigrate be available to YOU 24/7, and that is worth it.  Because it is all about YOU, at Lumigrate!  (We updated the "You Model" to include compounding pharmacy --- here it is!  Not yet on the Home page as that is on the list for the capable hands that I intend to have taking things over in the very near future.). 

Have a good Sunday and new week everyone, the time has changed and it gets light and dark earlier. I hope someday you can all hear Rock's Acoustic Sunday and boogie woogie a little and learn from him about music from his vantage point -- right off the bat when I called him to get his okay about the podcast, off the top of his head he was talking about amazing records he wants to talk to people about on the podcast here at Lumigrate about music and body, mind, spirit medicine.  He 'gets it' -- he even went into talking about an artist whose recent work is about adverse childhood experience and how that was for that songwriter/singer as an adult 'learning and growing'.   And I'll leave it to Rock to tell why it is, that he gets it, if he wants. I know he spoke on the air about some health challenges he had in the past, but I truly don't know the story -- I never see enough of him to know! But I look forward to MORE! ~~ Mardy

Link on Lumigrate to our podcast forum: Info on what podcasts ARE, the initial one with Chris Young and me, and an introduction about them.  www.lumigrate.com/forums/introduction-lumigrate-lg-101/podcasts-listen-computer-or-portable-electronics [1]

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WHO WOULD YOU ADD TO THE YOU MODEL?  Today, I would add DDS (dentist).  Tom Kociemba of Juice Plus+ added something yesterday that is a really good piece in the nutrition/supplementation forum here at Lumigrate.com that is a dentist talking about nutrition and the oral cavity.  LOTS going on with Lumigrate, and it just is 'taking off' right on schedule or ahead, ALL the time, thanks to YOU, who come and learn, which inspires people to contribute.  I never thought I'd be like a music 'conductor' or producer!  But that is kinda what it's like.  Listen to your favorite music maybe, take care of yourselves and keep learning with us!