Loretta Collins

6 Weeks From a Wheelchair. Last Sunday I Walked Up the Aisle.

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I've been a pastor's wife for 31 years. Last spring, 5 words in a verse I'd read a thousand times stopped me cold. My faith isn't something I do on Sundays. It's who I am. Which is why it stings to admit the truth. It took a diagnosis, and 3 wasted years, before I understood what those 5 words meant. For 3 years, my legs had been quitting on me. Not all at once. It crept. First it was the grocery store. Halfway down the cereal aisle, my legs would start to burn and buckle. So I'd lean on the cart. Then lean harder. Until I was hunched over it like a woman 20 years older. Then it was the kitchen. I couldn't stand long enough to cook a Sunday dinner. Then it was the 100 feet from the car to the church doors. The hardest 100 feet of my week. The doctor had a name for it. Spinal stenosis. "The canal in your spine is narrowing. It's pinching the nerves. It's your age. We'll manage it." Manage it. Physical therapy that did nothing. A shot that helped for 6 weeks, then quit. A surgeon who wanted to shave away bone, and admitted, when I pushed, that 4 in 10 don't get better. And one word nobody would say out loud. Wheelchair. I'd watched my own mother vanish into one. I knew this road. Every mile of it. So I did what a pastor's wife does. I prayed. But here's what I've never admitted to anyone. Somewhere in that third year, I stopped praying to get better. I didn't decide to. It just got quieter. Smaller. "Lord, just get me up the porch steps." "Just let me make it through the service." "Just don't let me be a burden to him." I still believed God could. I'd just stopped believing He would. For me. If you've ever shrunk your own prayer down that small, you know the kind of tired I mean. Then came that Tuesday morning. I was reading Isaiah. Chapter 40. The last verse. "They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not be faint." I've read that verse at funerals. At hospital beds. A hundred times. But that morning, 5 words reached up off the page and would not let me go. Walk. And not be faint. That was the exact thing my body could no longer do. And a thought came, almost angry. Then why can't I? I couldn't let it go. So that afternoon I did something I'd never done in 3 years of appointments. I started reading about WHY. Why do legs give out when a person walks? What does "the canal is narrowing" actually mean? What I found undid everything I'd been told... Yes, my canal was narrower. The MRI was real. But it wasn't closing because of the bone. It was closing because of the discs. Those little cushions between the bones. They're mostly water. The spacers that hold everything apart. And here's the part I read 3 times to be sure. Every night, when you lie down, the weight lifts off those discs. And they drink water back in. They swell back up. Your spine restores its own height while you sleep. Built to renew itself. Every single night. But a disc that's dried out with age stops drinking back in. It stays flat. The bones sink down onto each other. And the canal your nerves run through gets crushed from the inside. That's the pinch. That's why my legs quit the second I stood up straight. Then I read one line that made me put the phone down and just sit there. The way you take pressure off a nerve pinched like that is to bend forward. To open the canal back up. I froze. Because I'd been doing exactly that. For 2 years. Over a grocery cart. Every time I hunched on that cart, I was decompressing my own spine. I just never knew the word for it. The cart was the clue. I wasn't crazy, and I wasn't just old. My body had been telling me the answer the whole time. Now here's what made me angry before it made me hopeful. A dried disc can take water back on. It is not permanent. It's dried, not dead. And the doctors know this. It's in their own research. But there's no billing code for teaching a spine to do what God already built it to do. There's a code for the shot. A code for the $50,000 fusion. A code for the next appointment. There's no money in a woman who gets better and never comes back. So they hand you the word "degenerative," and let you believe it's just your age. It was never just my age. For weeks, one question wouldn't leave me alone. How does a 64-year-old woman give her discs their water back, at home, without a knife? The answer came from June. She sits three pews back. Retired physical therapist, 30 years. I caught her over coffee after service and told her more than I'd told my own doctor. She didn't blink. "Emily, that disc needs 3 things at once. Room to open up. Deep heat to pull the water back in. And the muscles around it to let go. Look at this." So I did. And it does the exact thing that cart was doing. Except it doesn't quit when you stand up. You lie back. Press one button. 15 minutes. It gently pulls the spine apart. Most people feel the release in the first minute. That's the canal letting go of years of pressure. Then a deep infrared heat sinks in and coaxes the water back into the disc. The refill your body forgot how to do. Then it works the clenched muscles loose on both sides. That last step is the one nothing else does. A shot can't reopen a canal. A heating pad can't refill a disc. The cart only helps while you stay bent over it. You need all three. Together. That's why nothing I'd tried ever held past the drive home. I ordered it that night. Half of me expected another gadget for the closet. It came on a Thursday. I did my 15 minutes in the recliner while my husband worked on his sermon. Friday morning, I stood up out of bed without the count to ten. Didn't even notice until I was already at the sink. By the end of the first week, I walked to the mailbox and back and forgot to be afraid. The second week, I cooked a full Sunday dinner on both feet. No cart. No counting. And then came the Sunday. I parked. Walked across the lot. Up the three steps. Through the doors. Up the aisle. All the way to the second pew on the left, where I've sat for 31 years. And when the first hymn started, I stood. I stood for the whole hymn. And the next one. And the sermon. My husband looked up from his notes, saw me on my feet, and lost his place mid-sentence. He found me after. He didn't say a word about my back. He just held my hand and said, "You walked in." Three years of praying myself smaller. And the answer was sitting in a verse I'd read a hundred times. About a body God built to renew itself, that no doctor ever taught me how to help. They will walk and not be faint. Turns out that wasn't only a promise about heaven. Now, before you go looking, one warning. Most of these back gadgets do one thing. A little heat. A little buzz. One thing will never be enough, because that canal needs all three at once to open. I found that out the hard way. The SmoothSpine is the one June trusts, and now the only one I do. It comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, so you feel it work before you're out a dime. But it's a small outfit. They can't make them fast, and they sell out. And skip the knockoffs on Amazon. The cheap copies are exactly what burned me. I'm not a doctor. I'm not in marketing. I'm just a woman who spent 3 years sure the wheelchair was coming, and found out it wasn't. The link below is the full explanation, written by a spine specialist. Why the canal really closes, and how this opens it back up. Read it before you spend a dollar, on this or anything else. Go read it. Then decide for yourself. https://try.smoothspine.com/tfbm-coc-adv2-ss