This is how our travel blog adventure in our teacups as the story-teller of our travels and adventures, took us on a journey of wellbeing and happiness. We started this blog as our connected expression of creativity and our shared love of writing, photography and adventure and yet we often notice how many times this blog carries us on its own journey.

When you’re travelling some days it feels like you’re taking a sort of happy drug, keeping your energy and your spirits high. Until that is, you’re standing at the base of a stairwell and you have to second guess yourself if your bad back will allow you to make the climb. That’s how it was for my travel buddy Bhanu, as we looked at the top of the temple peak at Angkor Wat in Cambodia and wondered if it was worth the risk. You see, for months, no wait, years actually she had been plagued by a bad back that constantly gave way to a roaming sort of pain that on a bad day could extend from her knees to her neck and settle just about anywhere.

Any combination of muscle knots, spasms, tightening and misalignment that could make her virtually immobile for days at a time. But as all of you who suffer with chronic back pain know, you somehow find a way through, going from one treatment to the next until the months roll into years. When she said to me one day “I can’t remember a day when I wasn’t in pain” clearly the time had come to do something more. I had watched her undergo no shortage of mainstream and alternative treatments and spend entire days running from one side of Delhi to the next, all in the hope that acupuncture, acupressure, ultrasound, shockwave therapy, IFT, dry needling or physiotherapy would work its wonders. At this point we realised that to climb the temple steps anywhere in the world, reclaiming our health and well-being would actually be the first step.

And so we are sharing this with you because what we found next really is making a difference. We are all deserving of a fulfilling, wonderful and healthy life and we hope that this treatment that has helped Bhanu, might be the magic that changes your life too. When you think about it, the body has its own alchemy happening every day; we cut our finger and we hardly notice that in a day or two it has all but disappeared, so if the body has the power to heal itself, maybe from time to time all it needs is a little push in the right direction.

Maybe like our minds as we get older, it becomes forgetful of its earlier injuries and consequently we carry around old pains as reminders that we need healing but with a body too weary to fix itself anymore. In a nutshell, that pretty well sums up what Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) Therapy is all about; by gently injecting the body’s own platelets into the injured area it kickstarts the muscles, tendons and ligaments to start the healing process once again. It has a very successful track record with athletes, particularly with the knees, shoulders, elbow joints and is very effective back pain therapy. Being a sporty child Bhanu always wondered why as an adult such injuries should plague her, but perhaps this is precisely the reason; too much exertion, especially on damaged muscles naturally wears the body down.

We found a wonderful doctor in Sydney who spent considerable time diagnosing and determining exactly the areas of the body that needed healing through ultrasound, testing for strength and mobility and understanding her history. He then marked the areas and reconfirmed again through ultrasound to be sure of the specific injury and where to reprogram the cells for the healing to recommence.

As a procedure, it’s not time-consuming, in fact a couple of sessions of PRP Therapy over the course of a few weeks is often enough. This worked perfectly for Bhanu travelling from overseas and needing a strong burst of treatment in a short time. As effective as she has found this treatment, it has been painful in equal measure; I commented in jest after the first session that it felt like I’d gone through labour with her! But as fortune favours the brave, within a couple of hours the pain had subsided and the smile glowingly returned to her face.

Just the next day she came to me, with eyes full of happy tears and lifted her arm, an exceptional joy for someone whose shoulder had been hampered since childhood. For the first time in years the energy and life had returned to old injuries and we know that the ability to throw away a whole medicine bag of painkillers, muscle relaxants, support bandages and magnets is the result of PRP Therapy. Watching the transformation over the coming weeks just reinforced the belief that though the path to good health may be not always be a smooth one, it is one that we are all deserving of. Believe you will get better and with the persistence of the angels, keep searching until your good health enables you to be the best version of yourself.

We’ve seen how our travel blog has gently carried us to meet people, to expand our knowledge and join workshops that we might never have done if not for finding a hub to bring these experiences to. And so it was that the urge to travel and jump into new adventures was the quiet symbol to push her forward and reclaim her well-being. We have a diverse bucket-list of wonderful places and experiences to explore and with the healing power of PRP Therapy, we’re now one step closer.