EPISODE SUMMARY
GUEST: Miriam Elder
Miriam talks to her mom, Ruth, about what it was like growing up in an Upper Cervical Chiropractic family. What was normal health care like? She details her struggles as a result of undiagnosed and untreated amblyopia. As a Master's student of Early Childhood Education, Miriam gives some great advice for parents of young children regarding warning signs and screenings for vision problems.
Here is the link to another episode mentioned in this interview:
Ian Bulow - When people say "I don't believe in chiropractic"
To get in touch with Matthew contact Ruth.
To contact Ruth, go to https://www.blairclinic.com
https://www.facebook.com/rutelin
Transcript
Welcome, welcome, welcome to What Pain in the Neck. I am Ruth Elder, your host, and in this podcast episode, I am talking to a very special person. And that is my firstborn, my daughter, Miriam Joy. Hi Miriam.
Hi mom.
Welcome to the show, and thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
You're welcome.
Can you say where we are right now?
Well, right now we're in my mom's podcast studio at my dad's office in Lubbock, Texas.
Yes. At the Blair Chiropractic Clinic.
At the Blair Chiropractic Clinic.
Yes. But that is not home for you really, is it?
No, it's not.
So where do you live?
Well, right now I live in Oslo, Norway. And I have lived there pretty much my entire adult life. So that's going on seven years.
Seven years. And how old are you?
I'm 26 years old.
So that's a good long time. Where did you live before that?
Well, before that I lived in Lancaster, California. That's really like my hometown. If I talk about my hometown, that's where I talk about.
Yeah. So you were born there?
I was born there and raised there.
And you lived there all the way through high school?
Yeah.
Yeah. And that was your dad's hometown and your grandma's hometown.
Yeah. Multi-generational hometown.
Yes. So when you were born, you obviously don't remember this, but your dad was a chiropractic student at the time. You have grown up your entire life with a chiropractor as a dad. I have an extremely cute picture of you when you were probably around 18 months old. Maybe even before that because I don't think your brother was born yet, but just a little toddler, and your dad was doing chiropractic checks in our living room, on his portable table, on your grandparents, and you were stepping up and pretending to do it too.
So chiropractic has just been a normal part of life for you.
Yeah.
We had another person on the show. It was actually Dr. Ian Bulow that had an aha moment in, I think he was in high school. He might've been a little bit younger, middle school maybe.Where he met the chiropractor and went to their home and he had this aha moment, “This is a normal home.” Can you talk about that, your experience of growing up with chiropractors and the perception that you felt around you?
Our house was a house just like any other, although we did have a foldable travelable chiropractic table that I'm sure is not normal.
Yeah, we always had the chiropractic table up in our house.
Yes. It was never put away. It was always usually in mom and dad's room. Now it's not, but it usually always was. And I mean, when you're a kid, you don't really know what's normal outside of your own little world. So you get to school, you go home. Your home life is, you think that's how everyone's home is. But I think I understood relatively quickly that having a dad that's a chiropractor is not, especially when as specialized as that is, that is not super normal because none of my friends - none of their parents had the same job.
Like I had friends whose parents had very normal jobs and maybe there were several that had the same type of job in one class.
So there were several teachers and several engineers. There was a lot of engineers in the Antelope Valley.
A lot of engineers or pilots was also a thing in Lancaster.
But not several chiropractors.
But not several chiropractors. I was always the only one with a dad that was a chiropractor.
Okay, so you talked about the table at home so why did we have a table at home?
Well, I assume it was so that dad could check us at home. He regularly checked mom. I'm sure it happened several times a week, if not every day. For a lot of my life.
Well, it wasn't every day.
It wasn't every day.
But it was very, very regularly.
And I am surprised he never got annoyed because I'm sure I asked him to check me more times than I needed to be checked, but that's okay.
It's a perk.
It's a perk.
Fringe benefits.
Yes, fringe benefits. So I've been checked lots and lots of times in my life. But I haven't been adjusted as many times and I've been checked obviously.
Yeah, and actually that's a really good point is actually where I wanna go next. Would you mind if I talk about the first time you were ever adjusted?
Go ahead.
And the reason I'm not asking you to tell that story is you were 15 months old.
Okay, so I wouldn't remember.
No, you weren't 15 months old. You were 13 months old. You're one year and one month. And that was not the first time you were checked, actually, the first time you were checked is you were less than a week old.
I was working for Dr. Muncy, who was Dr. Blair's best friend and co-developer of the Blair technique. And because I worked there in the clinic and your dad was in chiropractic school we understood the importance of the healthy spine and that sometimes birth can cause real trauma to the baby. And while your delivery wasn't complicated, it also wasn't uncomplicated, and we just wanted to make sure that you got the best starting life. Of course, because you were like the best thing that ever happened to me and I just wanted all the best for you. So we had your spine checked and you were fine, you didn't need any care. And occasionally, as part of your wellness care, you were checked regularly from the time you were five days old, and you never went out of alignment until one day. I remember it.
We were at your grandma's house and you were crawling and all of a sudden you smacked like your arms came out or something. And you smacked your head on the floor and you know, at that age, kids fall a lot, but there was something different. Like your cry was just a little bit different and you cried for a long time. The next day you came down with a fever and flu symptoms and you had never even had so much as a cold your whole time being a baby. And that's also something that can often happen if the spine is okay, but the next day after this fall, you had a fever. And so what did I do? Did I take you to urgent care to get antibiotics, do you think? I'm sure you take a guess.
I'm sure you didn't because that's not something that ever really happened as a child.
Well, yeah, we did go to urgent care. I mean, maybe once or twice in your life, maybe.
Yeah. But that was only when I potentially broke something.
Yeah. So the first thing we would always do when you were sick was?
We would always get either checked by dad or in this case Dr. Muncy.
Yeah, Dr. Muncy because your dad was still in school and had your neck checked and sure enough your neck had gone out of alignment and he x-rayed you. And adjusted you and an adjustment for a young child like that is just like a little tap and you struggled and cried. But that's because we had to hold you still in the x-ray machine. And other than that you wouldn't know that anything happened. And within a couple of days you were over that really severe fever and cold and sickness that you had. You were holding your adjustment really well, and like you said, it was a very regular thing to get checked, but it was very rare you needed to be adjusted.
For a long time in my childhood, I remember registering, it was about once a year.
Really?
Yeah, because I remember having a conversation. I was really young. I was like eight or nine. And I remember having a conversation with Dad about it. That was like probably about once a year I got adjusted.
Okay. And what happened?
Well, usually not in my adult life, but when I was a kid, if I got sick, it usually was a sign that I was out of alignment and almost always that was the case.
Yeah. I mean, some people feel nothing. Some people have pain, but in your case, that's when you got your cold and flu symptoms or a fever.
Usually it was like a sinus infection.
And so then you got adjusted.
And then I almost always felt better a couple days afterwards.
Do you have any idea if you ever got antibiotics? I can't ever remember that you did.
Maybe I maybe got antibiotics a couple times as a teenager when I was in alignment and I had been sick for like lots of days. I remember when I was in high school, it happened a couple times where I had missed nearly two full weeks of school because I was sick and I was in alignment. And then we had to go to like urgent care or Kaiser or somewhere.
Yeah. So you were overall pretty healthy.
There's a particular situation that I want to ask you about this podcast. What Pain in the neck? Is all about true stories of resolution to suffering. You mentioned that when you're a kid, you only know things from your perspective and you don't know what's not necessarily normal other than whatever your experience is. And so one thing that you never told us about because it was normal to you, was that you couldn't see a lot of things. And you also don't know what you couldn't see. You didn't know.
No, I didn't know what's normal to not see.
Yeah, and this went on for a long time. And you were my first born. And although I consider myself a relatively educated person, again, I could only deal with the information that I knew. And I took you to the pediatrician for wellness checkup, the medical doctor. And one of the things he would always ask is, “is the hearing and vision okay?” And I would say, yeah, as far as I know, but I didn't have any information to know, how would I know? So as far as I knew, But then in first grade, there was a vision screening at school. Well, you didn't fare too well. You failed the vision test.
No, but I actually remember this vision test. And I remember thinking, “oh, I did so well on this vision test.” Come to find out I did not do well on this vision test. At all.
Yes. So we took you straight to get your eyes checked. And it turned out that one eye was perfect. And the other was completely blind. So can you talk about your situation? Now that you're an adult you can explain it better than I can.
So medically, it's called amblyopia. Some people refer to it as lazy eye. But lazy eye is a lot of different things really. So yeah, amblyopia is the most specific term for this.
Yeah. So amblyopia is one eye is working perfectly. And the other one is not hardly at all.
Perfectly or near perfectly in my case. When I was a kid it was perfect now it's not, and so the treatment for most of first grade was I had to wear an eye patch on my right eye for about six hours a day, and we had figured it out to wear if I wore my eye patch in the morning all the way when I was sitting in the car all the way up till I went to school. And then I put my eye patch in my backpack. Went to school and then as soon as I got in the car on my way home from school, my eyepatch would come back on so that I didn't have to wear my eyepatch at school.
Yeah, I think you only did that one or two days and it was the scariest thing ever.
So when we say eyepatch. So Amblyopia, what happens is one eye has a weakness and the other eye is normal. And it's very confusing for the brain.
So the eye patch sort of trained my brain to have to see out of that eye. But my vision was still very poor in that eye. So even if I was wearing an eye patch and that I was “turned on”, as you could say, I still couldn't see well.
So essentially what happens when there's a big difference is the brain shuts off the weaker eye because it's too confusing to process two different wavelengths so to speak. And so the weak eye just shuts down completely. The nerve pathways quit working. So the eye patch was to force that weak eye to start working again. But despite your lenses, those nerves were weak. So you went from seeing out of one eye to hardly seeing at all. But that was forcing that…
The eye patch was forcing the neural pathways to be get trained and be able to work.
What was it like going out and wearing that eye patch? Can you describe some memories of wearing the eyepatch, what it felt like for you? And then also when you had to go out?
I didn't really go out or it was mostly reserved for family.
Or sometimes you'd come with me to the store or whatever.
Right. Well, the most prominent memory I have is, this was probably in the first week or two. I was wearing an eyepatch. I think mom knows where I'm going with this story. And we had found those, you know, pirate eye patches that are black. And I was like, “I don't wanna look like a pirate.” So I had decorated it with like some glitter.
Pink paint.
Pink paint, and tried to make it a little less piratey.
I don't know why we did it this way, but for some reason I was wearing the eye patch at church and someone came up to me and asked me if I was pretending to be a pirate. And I think I got really offended. I feel anxious just now thinking about it. I was already really insecure and obviously, I'm not pretending to be a pirate if I have this eye patch that I've tried to make pretty by painting it with glitter and pink paint. But after that, I think mom took me to one of dad's friends who is an optometrist, and he had these special eye patches that had like - they had like a pattern on them that just instead of going under my glasses, went over the one lens of my glasses and it had a pattern on it.
And it had pictures of a ballerina and things like that on it.
So, I think that was sort of the catalyst for getting this type of eye patch. So that's the one memory I have. I mean, I was about seven years old, I think when I started wearing an eye patch, and I probably only wore it for maybe a year. I don't remember how long it was, but. I mean, in the span of the life of a child, it felt like a long time.
Yeah. And then, you know, technically your eyes should work.
Right. Because now I've trained them to…
But practically speaking, you were running into walls. You were falling. You were tripping into things. You missed steps.
I mean, if we didn't laugh about it, we would cry I think. It was a very normal experience for me to slip or miss a step or run into a pole or a wall.
It's amazing that you were holding your adjustment.
I know, and Mom was telling me a story the other day about how I said, “at least this time my glasses didn't break.” We probably replaced my glasses a lot more than normal.
No. What you said was you had gotten new glasses. And first day you ran into something and bent the glasses and you said, “oh, my old glasses never broke whenever I ran into walls.” And it just, oh, it broke my heart. That was a normal part of life for you.
Yeah, it was, needless to say, I didn't have a lot of depth perception and I had tunnel vision, so I didn't have - I'm only coming up with the Norwegian word.
Peripheral vision.
Peripheral vision.
And depth Perception.
And depth perception. So I could only see what was like - I couldn't see how far things away from my face were. And then, and I could only see basically just what was right in front of me.
An example of this is when you were a young child, preschooler, kindergarten, younger elementary school, you're really, really good at throwing a ball. You had a killer arm you could throw way above your age level, but you could never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever catch the darn thing.
That's true. I still struggle with that.
Yes. And I was wondering, “well, how old do kids have to be before they can learn to catch a ball?” But that's what I should have known was a red flag. But I didn't know what any of the signs were. The other thing that I should have noticed if I knew was forming letters and fine motor skills. were really difficult for you. You practiced more than any child I know. To form letters and write your name. And it took you a long time.
And it took me, compared to the rest of my class, it took me a long time to learn to read also. My first grade teacher was very excited when I learned how to read.
I remember she came running out to parent pick up and she had a book in her hand and she was almost jumping up and down. She was opening this book and it was Frog and Toad. And she was jumping up and down and she said, “Miriam is reading this. Miriam is reading this.”
And from that day on, I did not stop.
They cannot stop you. But that was you. You're super tenacious and strong-willed and put in the work.
So, but this podcast, What Pain in the Neck? Is about resolution to suffering. So we did find a solution of sorts.
Yeah, so this solution was, there's a doctor in the Encino LA area who specializes in amblyopia and he does vision therapy. So he specializes in vision therapy for people/ probably mostly kids with amblyopia.
So that was Dr…
Dr. Etting.
Dr. Etting. And I think his office is still there. I think he might have retired, but there are some younger doctors.
The last couple times I've been there, it hasn't been Dr. Etting that's seen me, but it's still his practice.
Yes. And there's vision therapy. You can still do vision therapy all over.
So talk about what is vision therapy?
I think it was the summer before sixth grade, before I started middle school. We, or not we, my parents decided that now was a good time to do vision therapy because I was really tired and I was really struggling in school, and school was really, really hard for me, even though I worked hard. It just made me really tired.
Can I interrupt you for a second?
Yeah.
With a detail that is important. So one of my motivations or my actually main motivation for this podcast is to get information out. And the reason we didn't do it sooner is we didn't know about the solution.
Oh, okay.
Dr. Etting came and gave a talk at the school. And I attended a one hour lecture and he was talking all about how important vision was, what the signs were, if kids were struggling, what could be done about it. And so we made an appointment because now we knew, and that's been kind of a recurring theme in a lot of these podcasts episodes is if you have a problem, if you're suffering, keep looking for a solution and the solution is out there. And that's what happened. It took a long time, and I sincerely wish that we had taken you to do vision therapy when you were 3 and not when you were 12.
Almost 12. Yes, I was 11. I remember because I graduated vision therapy two days after my 12th birthday or something.
So what is vision therapy? o first of all, if you can just really quickly sum up what it is and then get into some of the examples of what it was like to actually do it.
Okay. So basically it's like, I mean, physical therapy basically for your eyes. So we would go down to Encino. It would be like, depending on the traffic, an hour and a half. Forty-five minutes if there was not a lot of traffic, and we would go twice a week and I would go and do some exercises at the offices and then we would get homework and we had to do those twice a day.
Can you describe some of these exercises? Do you remember them?
Well, some of them was like hitting a ball around. Some of them were on a computer where I had to keep my eyes trained on one spot and try to use the mouse to get different spots so that I wasn't like turning my head to try and find other spots. I was supposed to try and click. Some of 'em were with my eye patch. Some of them weren't. I don't remember a lot of specifics, but I do remember that that summer was a very difficult summer. Well, there were other things that were happening other than this vision therapy that also made it difficult, but this was a factor in why this summer was very difficult.
We fought a lot because you didn't want to do your exercises because it made you dizzy. You would get headaches. And it was hard.
It was really hard. And it was six months. When school started, we only went once a week, but the entire summer we went from June to August. It was two days a week. Every single week.
Yeah. So normally this program would take nine months, but we, because it was summer, we went extra. It was accelerated for you. But it was terrible. We fought a lot. I forced you to do a lot of things you didn't wanna do.
Yeah, that's true. A lot of hours in the car. So I have a lot of memories of the car rides actually. I actually almost have more memories of the car rides than I do of the actual vision therapy.
Well, the car rides weren't that bad.
No.
Because it was difficult for you, we'd stop and get soft served at McDonald's.
Yeah, if we didn't park in the parking lot at the office and we walked to the office and park in the free parking we would stop at McDonald's about halfway. And get ice cream.
Yeah, that's true. We have, we were on a very tight budget in those days and vision therapy was not cheap. I do remember we'd park on the street and save the parking fee to buy soft serve.
And for an eleven-year-old me, that was worth it. It probably still would be worth it actually.
Yes. You do like your desserts.
I do. Should I talk a little bit about what happened after vision therapy though?
Yes, yes, yes.
So when I started sixth grade, in sixth grade, that's when you can start, at least in my school, where you could start choosing electives. And I didn't get to do any of the fun electives. I had to do the elective at the end of the day that was for kids that struggled in school. And that was not my choice, but I remember - I distinctly remember sitting there in this like study hall type elective and being like, “this is so much easier.” I had so much more energy at the end of the day. And school was all of a sudden so much more fun and easier because I had more energy because all of a sudden my eyes were working together. I mean, I still had to wear lenses of some sort. But I do remember it being a lot easier for me and not really needing the study hall. Because I had managed to do the work I needed to do in class instead of needing the extra time to do homework, because I could see.
Yeah. And one thing that I noticed as your mom, before you did vision therapy, we'd work on something, uh, let's say was math. And we'd work on it. And work on it and work on it. And you'd cry and you wouldn't get it. And then we'd work on it and work on it. And finally it's like, you got it. But then the next day. It's like it wasn't there at all.
Well, math is a bad example of that. I'm still a little bit like that.
Okay. But I remember that the things that we were working on, like the next day, it was like completely gone again. Whereas after you did the visual therapy, you were working on things and then the next day it had stuck.
The retention was better.
It would be like normal learning. You didn't get something and you worked on it and then it stuck. Whereas before. It was almost like whatever we worked on the day before, it was nothing. So that's one of the things that I actually learned from that lecture with Dr. Edding is that I think it's 70% of all our sensory input and all our learning comes from our vision. So when your vision impaired, that's a pretty substantial handicap, for lack of a better word.
So anyway, in the long term, there are things in my life that I don't know that I would be able to do or would have the energy to do, because it would've been too difficult for me.
Like for instance, driving.
I don't know that I would've been able to drive had I been able to do this because of my depth perception and peripheral vision.
Yeah. But now you do, you do have depth perception and peripheral vision.
Yeah. It's definitely not perfect. I still - I haven't run into walls in years. But I do occasionally come a little closer to a wall than is probably normal. And my roommates and I, we split the cost of a ping-pong table, and most of the time I miss the ball because I think it's farther away than it is, or closer to me than it is. I've gotten hit in the face with a ping-pong ball, and flying objects, usually it's a ball, still scare me a little because I can't always see where it's coming from, but it's definitely better and I can drive. So they've said I'm a safe driver, so that's good.
Yeah, so it's definitely return function to your life.
Right. And like now I live in Norway and I am studying to get a master's degree, and that is so difficult and so exhausting. If I was as vision impaired as I was when I was a kid, I don't think that would be possible for me to do that. So it's had great long term effects, so it sucked in the short term, but…
Which of course is why I forced you to do your exercises right, because I was able to see the long view. And also I had, forked over the thousands of dollars to pay for the therapy.
Yes. So there's no way those were going to waste. It was definitely a good thing that I did it. And, you know, as an eleven-year-old, you're not necessarily capable of thinking that long-term. But now it's definitely something that was really, really good for me.
Okay. So to sum this up, what I wish had been different for me as your mom was, would be to be more educated on what vision is and what science to look for. And, I have many times on this show said, “bring your kids to get checked by the chiropractor. Get, get your kids' vision and hearing checked.” So that was actually the first thing that I did when you had this diagnosis. I made appointments. I have three other younger children. I made appointments for the three younger children to get their eyes checked and I made hearing appointments.
I remember the hearing. I've only been to the audiologist once, but I do remember it.
And they were very confused, like, “why are you here?” And I just thought, “okay, I wanna make sure everything is working right.” So that would be the takeaway. Whatever's important for your health, hearing, seeing, teeth…
Neck.
Neck. Yes. Definitely. Get it checked occasionally because there's experts who know what the signs are when you don't. So that would be my advice from a mom point of view. For you as a kid growing up with amblyopia and being vision impaired. What advice or what thoughts, or is there anything that you would like to say to a person that might be in a similar situation or a mom that's not sure or…
Well, I'm getting a master's degree in beginning education, and I don't know if I can talk about what, as a kid, what I thought, because I didn't know any different. But from a developmental standpoint, something that I look out for when I'm student teaching is kids that are leaning a little too far forward when they're reading, you know, your book should not be right up to your face. It should be about,
Arm's length away.
Yeah, it should be arm's length away and your child should still be able to read clearly what's on the page. Or if they're having trouble with things like catching a ball or maybe they're a little clumsy. I mean, my motor skills still, because I couldn't see for most of my development, my motor skills are still not great.
You missed stages of development.
I missed stages of development because I couldn't see, so there are things that are really difficult for me to do. Things like in Norway it's very popular to ski. Learning how to ski for me is really difficult because the, the motor skill - I never learned the motor skills because I couldn't see. So if you're noticing that your child should be able to do something but isn't quite. It might just be that they can't see.
The other thing that I should have noticed is that one of your eyes is slightly more open than the other.
In pictures, there's always one eye that's more closed than the other. And I wish it wasn't like that, but the Blair Chiropractic Technique is built upon the fact that the body's not symmetrical. So I suppose I should just accept that fact.
Yes. But if we had been knowledgeable, we would've known. So educate yourself and get your kids checked out.
Right.
Is that the takeaway?
Yeah.
Anything else you wanna say?
No, I think I'm all talked out on that subject.
You know, one thing that I want to say on the record. Miriam, I'm very proud of you.
Thanks, mom.