Health Built on a Strong Foundation

Unbelievable!! I’ll never be able to explain the amount of pain, chronic pain I’ve been battling soon to be two years. Every doctor in the area trying, failing, or turning me away. I pretty much was living at the ER until a doctor recommended Sarah at Foundational Concepts. Everything I didn’t believe in like the mind and body are truly connected. That my pain was real. Yes, you read that right. My pain is real! For two years everyone told me even from the ER that this was not real, and that this was a mental issue. To seek mental health. Foundational Concepts, Sarah and everyone there for the first time ever took the time to hear my horrific journey and acknowledged that my pain was real! I wasn’t crazy!

Sarah is magical. I can’t explain everything she’s done and shown me. Patience, HUGE!! No matter what kind of condition I’m in that day, Sarah embraces me entirely. I’m not just a patient. You see it in her eyes, her taking everything you’re explaining and experiencing in. Never, not ever once discrediting anything I had to say. How I felt, thought, whatever it was, Sarah embraced it all and supported me. She has given me tools to help battle my pain and the magical part is her ability to nail exactly where the pain is coming from. Like I said magical. I still am in awe. She’s constantly working and creating a plan personally suited for me and the end result, goal is for me to be pain free.

No one has done or given me any kind of hope in the medical world other than Sarah and her team at Foundational Concepts. Don’t be hesitant like I was. You’re wasting even more precious time. If you’re battling some sort of pain or chronic pain like me, please make an appointment. A simple consultation can’t hurt. You’re already hurting, so why not give them a chance. You will not regret it. I thank the Lord for sending Sarah and her crew to help me. I’m beyond blessed. Make the call.

Julia Foster, DPT was very knowledgeable about what may help me and I felt “listened to” which is the first step in trusting the process.

I am sincerely grateful for Foundational Concepts. Sarah and her team have been my most important ally for recovery after nerve damage from a herniated disc and spinal surgery. Sarah’s knowledge, experience, and care goes beyond the pelvic floor. She informed me of pain management, therapeutic exercises, and also explained my injury in terms that helped me know the work required to heal the muscles, nerves, and my own need to create goals again. In addition, when I realized I needed more than the physical therapy provided by Sarah, I took advantage of the holistic partnership with Foundational Concepts and Worth It therapy services with Jennifer Worth. Mindfully gaining skills and using the EMDR process supported my whole recovery with chronic pain, injury, and nerve damage. All patients of spinal injuries should advocate and utilize the value of pelvic floor support and stabilization in their recovery.

Sarah and I have been working together for several weeks.  My pelvic pain is related to scar tissue from surgery, poor body mechanics (carrying a grandchild on my hip), weak glutes, hip flexors that weren’t working correctly and a weak core.  I’m learning to stabilize my pelvis, strengthen my glutes, retrain my muscles and to relieve a sudden attack (internal cramping) on my own.

Sarah, through internal manipulation is releasing some scar tissue and helping to desensitize sore tendons, ligaments and internal muscles.  It’s an education to realize that hips, back, glutes, quads, abs and diaphragm all work together.  When one body part (even very small ones) get either out of alignment or injured, there is a domino effect.  Likewise, soothing one area can carry over to other areas and all is relieved. Stress, which tends to tighten up all of my muscles, is also a factor.

This is a specialty physical therapy and focused.  The results have been remarkable.  I went in with pain and am now, pain free. I’m on, what I call, a maintenance routine. I can set an appointment when I feel I need one, just to check out my body and fine tune the manipulations and strengthening exercises. I want to maintain what we’ve accomplished.

I appreciate the sensitivity, kindness, knowledge and smile that Sarah brings to our sessions.  She has a very professional manner and is easy to talk to.  There isn’t anything that cannot be discussed.  I find it truly amazing that many physicians don’t know about pelvic pain physical therapy.  It was my inquisitiveness, reading and searching on the internet that I found help and relief from pain.

Jennifer Cumming is the consummate professional, and is extremely knowledgeable in the physical therapy field, especially pelvic floor physical therapy. I find the office environment at Foundational Concepts to be inviting, and non-stressful. Jennifer has created a complete orthopedic wellness plan following surgery that has made an outstanding difference in my quality of life. Office visits, at-home therapeutic exercise plans, stabilization and sound advice on living well with a disability.

To anyone newly diagnosed with interstitial cystitis, the disease seems like the end. The end of our happiness, our well being, and the life we knew. I have been there and have felt that fear. But there is hope and light to be found, and I am living proof that it can and will get better.

So much of my remarkable improvement is thanks so the physical therapy and muscle retraining I underwent under the expert and compassionate guidance of Sarah Dominguez. She will work with you at your own pace to help you understand why you are in pain and how to change the way your body functions in order to promote relief and a happier, healthier life. She has gone to such incredible lengths to help me heal, and I am at the point where I only go in for a bladder treatment once every four or five weeks. I recommend her to the highest degree!

My initial visit to Jenn was to treat multiple annoyances that I felt I could live with. I had residual pelvic instability/muscle imbalances from a near fatal car accident, a couple bad falls, and multiple child births. Nobody’s perfect, right? After one visit, I was pleasantly surprised to find a balanced pelvis and less incontinence. Not to mention efficient movement when I biked and hiked with my family. I followed up with Sarah a couple weeks later and left with tools and exercises that improved my own self-awareness so I could hold the changes.

These ladies are miracle workers who treat the whole body. Jenn and Sarah care about the well-being of each and every client, too. I truly appreciate the education that I took from each visit. I highly recommend to anyone who accepts the body’s annoying signals as just another thing they can live with, to make the time to see these wonderful physical therapists.

I started physical therapy with Jen after a bad foreign body reaction to a urethral sling. The sling was fully removed 8 weeks after it was implanted. There was extensive scarring and adhesions along the urethral tubes and vaginal walls. I was experiencing horrible vaginal/urethral pain and urinary retention. I could not work or perform normal daily activities due to the debilitating pain.

After twice weekly visits with Jen for a couple of months, the pain was down to a manageable level and the urinary retention was reduced to intermittent episodes. Prior to this, I had constant retention and pain. It has taken several months of hard work, but with Jen’s help I am now pain-free most days and the retention rarely occurs. I am very grateful to Jen for her help and feel that I would still be suffering every day if I had not gone to her for physical therapy. She helped me get my life back and I can’t thank her enough.

I need to let you know that I had one of the most meaningful and emotional 5K runs of my life on Thanksgiving, thanks to you. I was able to run the entire 32 minutes of the 5K without ANY issues. I am forever grateful for finding out about you and all that you’ve done to help me heal and get back to where I was before having a baby. I was losing hope, and you have restored that for me.

I was a patient of Foundational Concepts this winter. After just four sessions, my therapist helped me overcome vaginismus, which I’d been struggling with for 15 years. I recently had my first pain-free annual pelvic exam EVER, and my doc took “vaginismus” off my chart. I am so grateful for your clinic. I’m also a little mad that it took me so long to get referred for PT!

Jennifer and her colleagues at Foundational Concepts are extremely compassionate and are superior quality care providers. I recommend their services to all who ask about my experiences following orthopedic surgery. Foundational Concepts is also exceptional in their efforts to coordinate care with my entire medical team in other specialties (traditional and holistic). The physical therapy and emotional support I found through Jennifer Cumming at Foundational Concepts truly changed my life for the better.

Remember when you thought 30 was old? I do.  Anyone 30 or over knows now that 30 is not nearly as old as we imagined.  At 53, I felt very old.

I don’t appear old. I have been told I look and act much younger than my age. Nevertheless, I felt very old, due to incontinence. I thought incontinence only happened to “old ladies”.  Not so. I have been struggling with the embarrassing, humiliating, confidence-stealing incontinence monster for almost ten years. I finally saw a urologist in 2006, after my bladder emptied completely during a fit of laughter in a parking garage. After much thought, I chose to have an outpatient surgery during which the surgeon injected collagen into my urethra to close it just enough to prevent unexpected leaking. It worked! For about three years. Then, the monster returned. I had the collagen injection surgery a second time. It worked for about two years…then, back to sneezing leaks, coughing leaks, laughing leaks.

For most of 2013, I was leaking two, three, four times a day, and it was more than a little. Sometimes, my bladder would completely empty when I did not even have the urge as a warning. It happened at home, while shopping, at work,  sitting, standing, and walking.  Just from a sneeze, a cough, a laugh. It truly sapped my confidence. To wonder if people could smell that little old lady’s wet underpants as she walked by…ugh.

I went back to my urologist, Dr. Tomas Griebling, in June 2013. He told me collagen injections are no longer used as a remedy and suggested surgery would be my best bet.  He also recommended I try physical therapy and gave me a list of local providers.  On his recommendation, I called Sarah Dominguez at Foundational Concepts. Sarah’s Specialty is Pelvic Dysfunction.

She listened to my story and said she thought PT could help me. I was reluctant because of my high deductible – my health insurance would not cover any of the cost. In fact, I decided not to even try PT because of the cost. I just kept on leaking and feeling old. One Saturday, I had three glasses of wine and my bladder completely emptied as I was getting ready to have a romantic encounter with my husband. That was my breaking point.

I called Sarah and made an appointment. At my first session, Sarah gave me exercises to do at home and a special trick to teach my bladder to slow down and wait for me. The trick worked (and works!) so well, I made it through the rest of that Friday and through the entire weekend without one tiny leak! 10 years of leaking, and I went three days without so much as a drop!  I am so grateful to Sarah for her confidence in the techniques she teaches. I feel confident, young and hopeful again. This program worked so well for me that Dr. Griebling and I agreed surgery is no longer necessary. I baked him a cake. I gave Sarah a big hug! I highly recommend Sarah Dominguez at Foundational Concepts for Pelvic Physical Therapy.