Health and Wellness: Relief, Rehab, Renew

We call it summer snow. It is so beautiful and falls when the cottonwood trees bloom up north. Anyone with seasonal allergies knows what it is. I never had a issue with the massive cottonwood tree on the property where I worked in the summer at an open-air gazebo. On a particularly hot summer day, I started having trouble breathing.  I could not catch my breath and in several hours I felt like I was suffocating. When I told my father, he said it sounded like asthma. I had never had any breathing issues, so I blew it off in disbelief but could not deny it was getting worse quickly. At the time, I was seeing a chiropractor who was working with allergies and I had an appointment the next day so I mentioned the breathing issue. He performed a little treatment that made absolutely no sense to me at the time and sent me on my way. I was instructed to stay away from the cottonwood for a day. I did my best, since I had to take the whole day off to go to the doctors, so was no big deal.

I have a love/hate relationship with a paved trail I like to walk near where I live. Just about anytime I take a walk, there are other walkers, joggers, runners and quite a few professional looking bikers whizzing by. I love this trail, it is easy to walk and you can go for several miles, turn around and walk back or just 20 mins. I am not a power walker so most joggers and runners pass right by me. What is so difficult to me as a neuromuscular therapist who works with proper gait and muscle alignment, is to watch the way the runners and joggers use there bodies so inefficiently. I can almost see their knee pain developing right in front of my eyes. I once was behind a woman who I was pretty sure was "this close to a heart attack". Watching her, made me remember back to a good friend of my fathers, whom I observed working out on a treadmill at a gym I belonged to at the time.  I went home that night and told my father, he looked like he was going to have a heart attack. H