10/25/2025
Today is my 23rd anniversary of graduating with my Doctorate of Chiropractic from Palmer.
Each year I become more and more grateful for this journey and being lucky enough to pick out the best career for me.
I was a science nerd through and through. Throw me a class with a beaker and eye protection or set out a microscope with bacteria on the slide and have me guess the specimen and how it works. Or in high school talk to me about biology in any capacity, especially marine life and I would give my day to it.
I set my sites on Drake University after graduating from Badger High School in Lake Geneva, WI. I was going to be a marine biologist! Drake was a private school with great academics, sports and the only midwestern school with marine biology. (Obviously traveling for your ‘marine’ part.)
Science was my thing. After enrolling and pairing up with the pharmacy program and working at pharmacy’s over all my summers (Walgreen to Albertson in Texas), I knew I wanted to move to human sciences.
But what field? I looked into the following schools… MD, physical therapist, pharmacist, DO, podiatry and dentistry. I knew it was going to be hands on with patience’s helping people. #1 I was obsessed with how the human body worked and #2 I wanted to help people.
My third year at Drake, I stumbled into Dr Jeff Stickels office in Des Moines, Iowa and received a tour and my 1st adjustment. I had had awful migraine in high school and in college and he worked me through how my upper cervical spine was severely rotated and subluxed. When I was 13 years old, I fell 30 feet from the top of a huge tree in a pasture. Luckily I was with my best friend and the doctor said I HAD to of hit a branch on the way down to help break my fall, or I would have died from the impact. Well, not only did I not die, I walked a mile home with a severe concussion and a fractured left shoulder that was dislocated so bad it was hanging down to the side of my left leg. All I remember was ‘Jessica, you need to not look and we need to get you home NOW!’ So I walked home about a 1/2 mile with what felt like a bad headache and a very heavy left arm.
(to be continued…)
