Pain Management

Alright, are we live over here? I think so. This is my first time going live, so I'm new to this whole process and very excited about it. For those who don't know me, I am Josh Leddy and I am located in the Lake Minnetonka area of Minnesota. So it's about 25 minutes west of downtown Minneapolis. And And as I said before, I'm super excited to be here. And with this month's theme, Emerge at Your Own Pace, I feel like it's just necessary to give a background of how I got here. I initially had an idea of what I wanted to talk about, but I think I'll save it for next week when I'm in a different location that might be a little bit more relevant to the story.

So who am I and what am I doing on Cadre? I'm A lifelong entrepreneur, athlete, and my story and my relation to just being on Cadre is the life I've lived of physical pain that has turned into mental pain, spiritual pain, emotional pain. Just wondering why these things happened to my body and the impact that it took on me, right? So let's just let's just go right to the the initial moment of my life that kind of turned my whole trajectory around. And that was when I was 11 years old. Thanks for saying hello, Emily.

I feel welcome. Oh, we got a local mounder on there as well. I can't tell what your name is, but I'll search that later. AR Gerbs 42. Let's go. Let's go mound. Anyway, so 11 years old, first shift in a checking hockey game when I was a PEA. And I was checked from behind into the boards. Went in head first, taken off in a stretcher, ambulance, whole 9 yards. In the hospital, the doctors are looking at my neck because that was the main point of impact. And it was essentially determined that I'm okay.

So I told him, you know, it really hurts to walk. Every step is just very jarring pain in my low back. And I was told, Hey, that's just a bruise. You're going to be okay. So I was like, Alright, I'm going to be okay. I ended up playing two days later for the whole rest of the year and I just dealt with this pain, this bruise, right? And then I was told, Hey, that's just growing pains. You're growing through this injury here. It's just natural stuff. So I just dealt with it, right? And played for two years.

Now I'm playing soccer, I'm playing baseball, I'm playing hockey, water sports, you name it, doing it all. And then two years later, 13 years old, I'm in phantom hockey tryouts, going to check somebody, and all of a sudden my right ACL just tears. It's A non-contact injury. Those typically don't happen in hockey, especially in the manner that mine did. So here I am, 13 years old. I'm having ACL surgery. And in my recovery, I had a bad experience with painkillers where it just zonked me out and took the relationship away from my body.

So when I was sleeping at night, this leg immobilizer that I had to keep my knee straight for recovery shifted a little bit, dug into my quad, and I woke up with this incredible pain from a calcium deposit in my thigh. It was more painful than anything I'd ever experienced at that point in my life. So much so that if you were to blow on my toes just a little, it would be excruciating pain. And then I get put on other pain meds and all of a sudden, poop and blood and just scary stuff that a 13 year old doesn't need to experience.

So that really soured my relationship on painkillers at an early age and I didn't want to use them anymore. So this created this whole new relationship with my body where I was very in tune with it and just lived with pain and started living with pain every single day just thinking that was my norm. around that time when I'm 13 years old I started working with a personal trainer and that was actually the first time I was introduced to one of the modalities in my life that has stuck with me for well over 20 years and that's sauna.

So I was at the Plymouth Lifetime and had a personal trainer who got me on the right track so I was taking care of my body at a young age and that was a wonderful thing for me. So I ended up having a successful high school sports career. I pursued college hockey after that and was playing junior hockey up in Canada, had a great start to the season, ended up getting traded into the USHL, which was the one place that I wanted to be. I was getting recruited by Boston University at the time and they were able to scout me in the USHL as opposed to where I was in my Canadian league.

And everything was great. And my team, right before playoffs, were in a game, going to hit somebody and then all of a sudden My left knee gives out the same way that my right knee did when I was 13. So the left ACL is here now and I drive home on my 19th birthday to have surgery. And this was really a mental blow to me because I was having a good season, right? And then it's just taken away from me. So I was really upset, I was sad, I was frustrated, I was angry, I was all of the things and I was considering quitting hockey.

Ultimately, I decided that hockey was still my dream. I still wanted to play Division I hockey. I wanted to play professional in some capacity. So to help not necessarily trick myself, but reframe my focus, I ended up getting my first tattoo. I got some crossed hockey sticks in my back right shoulder with the intention of putting the logo for my college team on there and my number. And that was my goal. I was going to work towards that. So went back to my Canadian hockey team and had another fantastic season.

We were one of the best teams in the entire nation of Canada to the point where we were playing in the Dudley Hewitt Cup, which is a four-team tournament for all central Canadian teams and the winner of that tournament emerges to the Royal Bank Cup, which is another four team tournament spanning the entire nation of Canada. So needless to say, we were one of the best teams in the country still playing and I ended up, we were in a big game and there was a big play and I tried to bide my time and kind of bait one of the other players to come and check me while I waited for an opportunity to pass a puck.

And when this happened, the guy checked my leg into the boards as I tried to move away and smashed it into the boards badly to the point where I had another torn ACL. I didn't want to accept this so I ended up playing the whole rest of the game. This happened in the first period. We ended up going into double overtime where I got the game-winning assist on the goal that gave us a victory. And it was a great moment, but then reality set in afterwards. And it was a late game that went into double overtime, so we got done around midnight and then we had to play at 9 o'clock the next morning.

So that meant I had to get up. They somehow found a doctor for me to go and look at in the morning, Nothing was determined because I didn't have the ability to get an MRI. It was a Sunday morning. So I went and played and unknowingly went and played the last game of my entire hockey career with a leg fully wrapped up and not even able to move. And when I drove home, I didn't know that I had a torn ACL at this time, but I knew it was bad. And ultimately I got home, I found out I was torn. I cried.

I was devastated. I had then sent an e-mail to Boston University who had recruited me to go and play there. That was my dream school. I had to tell them I tore my ACL and I wouldn't be able to come this summer because I'm rehabbing. And that really set off this time period where I got to go and hang out with my friends. I went to, I got enrolled, I was luckily able to enroll at Augsburg. I had a brother that played there in the late 80s. So they just, they got me into school, started going to school there, tried to play for the team, but I ended up with an infection during my 30 ACL recovery.

same type of infection that Tom Brady had when he had his ACL surgery. And it resulted in what I was told was chronic patellar tendonitis that was never going to go away. And that was hard for me. And I had a fun time with my friends during what was my freshman year and their junior year. But then I started seeing these guys that I would play hockey against, have really successful college careers. And it really started weighing on me and I couldn't be around it. So I went down to school of Florida, tried to get away, tried to get into school for a sport management down there because that was what I thought was the path to work into professional sports.

And it ultimately, you know, I got this itch. I was training, I was trying to train for triathlons and my body was feeling pretty good. I was like, I think I can try to play hockey again. So I went back home, tried and just my body, my knee specifically couldn't take it. So that also, that was essentially the end of my sport career and now the beginning of this multi-year battle with depression. And this was, it was a really tough time for me. And, you know, In the story that I'm telling here, there's a lot of nuggets that'll turn into stories later on, so I can't really go into all of it right now.

So I want to give you the. cliff notes, but yeah, this depression was difficult. And ultimately, I was able to move through the depression and kind of get myself back on my feet. I reengaged with a business that I started when I was 2003, a lake weed removal business. And then that brought me out to Lake Minnetonka. And then I was coaching high school hockey. I was running a high school hockey league. My goal while going to school at EU of M was to become, I studied sport management there. I ended up coming back after Florida to utilize my connections that I had here to try to get into professional hockey.

And my lake weed removal business was doing too well and I enjoyed the one day a week Nochak Hockey League that I was running. I enjoyed coaching and all was well. I was feeling pretty good. I moved into a lake house on Lake Minnetonka that I was renting and life was fantastic. That's when nerve pain really started to creep into my life in the form of herniated discs from my back injury that happened. And I'm just realizing now that I failed to mention when I was 14 I was running at first base, playing baseball, and collapsed in a fit of pain.

I went to the doctor, looked at current x-rays, looked at old x-rays, and it was determined that when I was checked from behind when I was 11, that I actually fractured my L4, L5 vertebrae. Over the years, my spine slid forward and fused itself together, stunting my growth and creating compensation patterns that led to the first two ACL tears. It's a condition called spondylolisthesis and it was essentially this ticking time bomb in my body, right? So that pain came back when I was around 2011 and I got it under control and then around 2016 it came back in full force on a whole other level.

This was the the worst bout of pain I've ever experienced in my entire life. And nerve pain is so intense that it will rewire your brain to the point where you can't make regular decisions, you can't think, you're just struggling, you're just in it. And when you're in that type of pain for a prolonged period of time, it really can permanently change how you're thinking and how you're acting. So I was really scared. But I was also lucky that I had a nephew who was an NHL hockey player and I was able to utilize a lot of his resources to battle this naturally.

I had a doctor tell me that I needed to fuse like 3 or 4 vertebrae, that I'd never move well or play sports again. That was when I was 23 years old and I was just like, F you dude. No, I am not taking that answer. I'm going to figure this out. So that kind of set me on this path towards natural healing. I got myself to the point where I was able to function again. I was even playing hockey for a little bit, but until that, I was playing hockey from like 2011 to 2016 until that nerve pain incident.

And then I was so afraid of the pain that I stopped doing things for a while. And this was right around the time I was opening, I was starting a new business with my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, and a few friends. We were starting a business in the West Tonka area and while we were starting the business, life was so busy and I was so afraid of pain that I just went through the motions and didn't really take care of my body as much because I didn't want to hurt it. And then, let's fast track to COVID, COVID happens and The business that I started was a brewery with my friends and my wife.

And our business was essential during COVID. So we were open and we were grinding like you wouldn't believe. I mean, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, adjusting on the fly with every new change in how we can live our lives. And After a period of time of probably overconsumption of alcohol and eating a lot of food truck food, my wife and I both decided that we had to take our lives back. So we really started to focus on our health and wellness. And that got me motivated to write my story.

And I knew all along that I wanted to write a story about my journey and navigating pain. And now is the time. So After a couple years of really working hard on finding the routine to manage my pain, physical and mental and all of it, that got us to about 2023 and 2024. That's when I started writing my book. It's called Pain Management, My Pain, Your Gain. And that was a big release for me. I needed to get that off my shoulders. I needed to stop living this identity of pain that had stuck with me for so long.

I needed to figure out a way to get it out and move on. And that's what the book did for me. But then I was busy. I'm a business owner. I still have my lake weed and little business. I still have this brewery. But now I've written this book and I'm trying to promote it, but I don't have time to promote it. To continue the narrative, I decided that I wanted to start a podcast, a YouTube channel highlighting natural ways to fight pain. And I started that the winter, basically the January of 2025. And then around May last year, about a year ago, a friend of mine, Eric Perkins, Perk at Play, sends me a message and he says, hey, I got someone that you should meet.

And it was Luke. from Cadre. And anytime Perk is going to send you a message to get connected with somebody, you know it's going to be good. So I was excited. I was like, awesome. I get to meet this amazing person via Perk here. And I'm excited about it. So got connected with Luke. We immediately hit it off. We enjoyed a sauna and knew that there is something for us, something for our relationship. And You know, now we're talking about emerging at your own pace, bloom on your own timeline. You know, we knew that there was something to connect with, but just sometimes you can't dive into anything right away too soon.

And I took the necessary time to, you know, get to know Luke a little bit. I knew that I had a lot to offer and I have a lot to offer for CADRE, but I was going through this change of identity in a sense, this evolution of identity. And I wasn't quite ready. I had a lot to accomplish, a lot to do. So that's what I did. I kind of got to work doing my full-time stuff, utilizing my spare time to develop my role in the wellness world so that I can be a positive force for people. be a positive force for change because when you're stuck in an identity, that is a painful thing when you can't move forward and you're just stuck in that complacency.

And I've experienced numerous evolutions of identities over the years from being a hockey player, from being an entrepreneur, from being someone that's lived in pain, you know, a freshwater lakes advocate, you name it. I've moved through it. But My truest identity is that of a healer, that of someone who can take pain and turn it into a purpose, something positive. And that's what I'm here to do. So you could have got me last year, but you're getting me now. And I'm really excited for all the things to come.

I know I'll find a groove with storytelling here. I was kind of long-winded today, so I apologize for that. I'll try to make things a little bit more concise, but I just didn't know how to start. There's a lot to unpack with who I am, many layers, and I'm excited to share all of that. So hopefully you can kind of get to the point of this story where Sometimes when you're trying to become your best, most truest self, it takes a little time. It takes a little risk. And when you're taking those leaps of faith, it's just really important to follow your heart.

And when you follow your heart, that's going to lead you to the promised land. And I guess I'll just leave it with that. And I'll try to hone in on more shorter durations of speaking when it comes to telling stories. But I got a lot of stories to tell. I'm really excited to be part of the Kajra sphere and get connected with you all in some way, shape, or form, whether it's messaging through this platform, connecting for in-person events, or just seeing anybody around town at a wellness gathering.

I look forward to seeing you next week. Maybe I'll try to pop something on here in the meantime. Until then, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your week and I will see you next Wednesday. Cheers.