Relative Something

During the last year that I lived on a farm, when I was an 8-year-old boy, the bus that picked me up for school also picked up 9-year-old Cyndie Friswold from a neighborhood 1-mile to the north. Little did I know, riding that bus together back then, that our lives would eventually intertwine and lead to sharing 20 acres of woods and pasture in the beautiful countryside of southwest Wisconsin.

We didn’t know each other back when our families lived so close to each other. I didn’t really know her when we first met as teenagers. We fell for each other a short time after that first meeting, but never really dated exclusively during those high school years. There were plenty of spans of time when we were separated by physical distances during the years prior to getting married, which, in hind sight, just might have served us well for the times like last year, when Cyndie was in Boston.

I certainly didn’t expect that we would also end up sharing back ailments. For a few years now, Cyndie has been struggling with knee and hip pain. There are a variety of issues at play, but we both figured the primary problem was an arthritic hip. One doctor opinion she received while in Boston served to support our theory.

Since returning to Minnesota, Cyndie has been accompanying me on my morning walk and the follow up exercise sessions. Recently she visited a local doctor to get a confirmation of her hip-joint issues. That resulted in a surprise. She was told it wasn’t a hip problem or a knee problem, it was a back problem!

Yesterday that diagnosis was confirmed by a back specialist. She has the classic symptoms of a herniated disc impinging her L4 nerve. We will be sharing our workouts to build core strength toward taking pressure off of our aging discs.

We’ve come a long way together, from that shared bus route, to our similar back ailments. We can hardly wait to get to our next shared adventure, on our new property in Wisconsin.