Welcome to Dixie Lodge Living & Wellness, perhaps the world's most unique, fully immersive, high-intensity rehabilitation center. The Dixie Lodge is the product of my 24 years of personal and professional experience in catastrophic recovery.
I broke my neck when I was 18 years old. I had just started college and planned to become a dentist one day. The injury rendered my hands dysfunctional and my body seemingly no longer my own. The world became unfamiliar as I began to discover life from the perspective of a paralyzed guy in a wheelchair. Dentistry was no longer a consideration as I struggled to determine how or what I could possibly do with my life.
As a lifelong athlete, I found solace in rehabilitation and hard work. I wanted my therapy sessions to be like the gut-wrenching, muscle-burning football practices we had 3 times a day in high school. Therapy to me was a means to achieve a goal...and my goal was to maximize my physical, mental and social potential.
Within one year of my accident, I returned to college and decided to become an occupational therapist. I was intrigued by the vocation's basic premise, which was to enable individuals with various impairments to return to their daily roles. Soon after graduation I started a company called Sheridan Rehab Solutions with the goal of helping others with similar injuries return to their daily roles, and I used the same hard-work approach from my athletic days as the foundation of therapy. We would often incorporate sports or recreational activities into our therapy sessions, which lead me to realize just how powerful sports can be after sustaining a catastrophic injury. This is what lead to the creation of Michigan Sports Unlimited, a charitable organization whose mission is to provide adaptive sporting opportunities to individuals with disabilities.
The success of Sheridan Rehab Solutions and Michigan Sports Unlimited solidified my mission and future ambition. I knew my vocation in life would revolve around helping other individuals with physical disabilities achieve a certain level of personal success. Fusion Medical was founded not long thereafter and soon Level Eleven Physical Therapy would be born. Putting all of these tremendous resources under one roof has been my dream since seeing my first patient 17 years ago. Now, that day has come. Welcome to the Dixie Lodge!
In 2019, the Dixie Lodge and Level 11 Physical Therapy joined the Rehab Without Walls NeuroSolutions network to better serve our patients and share our great work with premier practitioners across the US. To learn more about Rehab Without Walls visit www.rehabwithoutwalls.com