From The Back to Health Podcast with Dr. Tanya Westerbeek. Listen to the full 32-minute episode above — the details are better told than summarized.
It was supposed to be a college drop-off. A flight, a dorm room, a hug, a flight home.
Instead: a forgotten ID. A canceled flight. A night with essentially no sleep. A hotel that would generously be described as a place with a bed in it. Rental car chaos. A criminal background check. Questions about an ex-boyfriend from thirty years ago. And, at the airport, a laptop that swabbed positive for bomb material.
The part that's actually about health
I tell this story because it's funny in retrospect, and because it's an unusually clean example of something we normally can't see: what an acute stress load does to a body in real time.
Over roughly 48 hours: sleep gone, hydration gone, meals replaced by whatever an airport had at 11 p.m., hours of sitting in molded plastic chairs, a fully activated nervous system with nowhere to put it, and zero control over the outcome.
If you designed a protocol to make someone's neck and low back hurt, that's it.
This is why people show up in pain after a trip
We see it constantly and patients almost never connect the dots. They didn't lift anything. They didn't fall. They just traveled — and then their back went out three days later.
- Sleep loss lowers pain tolerance measurably. The same signal hurts more on four hours of sleep.
- Prolonged sitting loads discs and shortens hip flexors, and airport chairs are engineered for stacking, not for spines.
- Sustained stress keeps muscles guarding — jaw, neck, shoulders, low back — for hours at a stretch.
- Dehydration and skipped meals leave tissue with nothing to recover on.
None of those alone is an injury. Stacked over two days, they're a setup.
What I'd tell a patient after a trip like that
- Sleep first. Not stretching, not the gym. Sleep.
- Walk before you sit. Twenty easy minutes will do more than an hour on a foam roller.
- Rehydrate deliberately for a couple of days, not just the first glass.
- Get back to normal movement fast — the guarding pattern outlasts the stress if you let it.
- If something is still cranky after a week, come get it looked at instead of waiting for it to become a story.
And the beautifully unpredictable mess of it all
The kid got to college. The laptop was, obviously, not a bomb. And I got a reminder that I give advice about stress and recovery far more easily than I take it.
That's most of what this podcast is: real stories, and the occasional useful thing buried in them.
Back To Health Clinics — Zeeland, Portage, and Muskegon.