I keep choosing movement.
Because four years in clinical environments showed me specifically what happens when the choosing stops and it scared me.
But the habit of choosing started long before the facilities did. It started with Tom’s hips, a cul de sac, and a dog with the zoomies.
How It Actually Started
For years I started and stopped exercise. I’d find a program, keep it for a few weeks, let it go. Start again in January, convinced things would be different. Make it to March. Maybe. The cycle was so familiar I’d stopped expecting it to break.
The walk that finally stuck wasn’t mine. It was Tom’s and Gracie’s.
Tom had his first hip replaced in February 2020. The second in August 2020. By the time the second surgery was done, we had also brought home Gracie — an Aussie Shepherd mix who made it immediately clear that walking was non-negotiable. She needed to go. Every day. Regardless of what we felt like. Our other dog, Gus, came along despite his objections.
So we went. Half a mile at a time. Cul de sac to cul de sac. Tom in recovery, me out of shape, Gracie pulling ahead and Gus trotting along on his short legs. I didn’t start because I had a fitness goal. I started because the dog needed a walk, Tom needed company, and the only way out the door was together. We made a simple rule: unless there was a real reason not to go, we went.
The walks got longer. We got stronger. Something was building that none of us were paying much attention to at the time.
When It Became Deliberate
By 2021 I was looking at the radiology program coming and doing an honest inventory. I was older than most of my future classmates would be. The clinical rotations were going to be physically demanding — long hours, concrete floors, equipment that required real physical effort to operate. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up.
That worry is what made it deliberate. We added strength workouts and a beginner yoga practice. Nothing dramatic. Just enough to build something to work with before the program started.
When I started school, the only available hour was 4am. So that’s when I did it. Not because I loved it. Because the program was going to ask a lot of my body, and I wanted to make sure it could answer.
Two years of 4am workouts. Two years of clinical rotations. I graduated stronger than I’d been in my adult life.
What Four Years in the Facilities Taught Me
I’ve now spent four years in clinical and working environments — children’s hospital, adult inpatient, outpatient, OR, orthopedic clinics. Two years as a student, two as a working tech.
What I see consistently are the structural consequences of decades of reduced movement. Joint spaces narrowed. Range of motion lost so gradually nobody noticed it happening. Pain that became normal because it arrived slowly.
I’m not describing failure. I’m describing what happens to a body over time without enough movement — quietly, incrementally, without any single moment you could point to and say: that’s where it turned.
Looking at this every day changed why I get up and move.
To be able to do the things that make my life feel like mine — walk trails, take stairs, move through an airport without managing discomfort the whole way. Those aren’t ambitious goals. They require ongoing attention. And four years of imaging have made that specific and concrete in a way no fitness goal ever did.
What Access Actually Means
Tom’s hips are both replaced now. What he talks about most — more than the surgeries, more than the recovery — is what the walks gave back.
Not fitness. Access.
When access has been taken away and returned, you understand what it actually is in a way most people don’t have to until much later. He knows specifically and physically what capacity means. He doesn’t take the walk for granted.
I think about that often on the mornings I’d rather not go.
One walk at a time. One lift at a time. One yoga class at a time. That’s how the floor gets built — not all at once, not dramatically, not when you finally find the motivation you’ve been waiting for.
The walk isn’t the point.
The access is.
And access is built long before you need it.
The Fully Lived Framework has a whole module built around exactly this — not a fitness program, not optimization, just the physical floor that makes everything else possible. The beta runs this September with a small cohort. If that sounds like your thing, get on the waitlist here.
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