The story of how The Flax Pac Heating Pad was born...
We are a Canadian company located in Hamilton, Ontario
We create heating pads made with Canadian grown flax seed & lavender and this is the story of how The Flax Pac was born...
I was standing in the X-ray booth with the technician and my heart sank to my toes! First came totally paralyzing fear. Then - OMG - I am a horrible mother was all that went through my head. I was staring at my daughters spine. To be more accurate, I was staring at my daughters curved up spine that looked like a snake making a left hand turn. Immediately after thinking I was the worst mother on the planet, my second thought was how in the heck is she still standing with a spine like that? Any mother who has seen the X ray of their child's spine with idiopathic scoliosis knows exactly what I'm talking about. It is pure fear because initially you don't really understand what you're looking at. The guilt hit me like a ton of bricks. I had dismissed my daughters complaints about her sore back for at least 6 months and chalked it up to sports, poor posture due to excessive phone use or growing pains. I could not have been more wrong! Below is the actual picture from that appointment!
After several weeks of fretting over that X-ray (that I had no business looking at without a doctor present to calm my fears) we finally got to see a specialist. As it is with most things, I didn't have as much to fret about as I initial thought (hard to believe by looking at the photo!) but we did discover we were on a pretty strict timeline for any corrective measures given she was already 15 years old. She only had a 5% curvature which is mild ... I know, it looks like WAY more than 5% but apparently this is what a 5% curvature looks like! Girls stop growing around 16 so we had one year to help her correct the spine before she and her spine stopped growing.
Type A personality barely scratches the surface in describing me and as such I went full steam ahead trying to help my daughter correct her spine. I sold a bunkbed we used in our spare room for guests and had my husband build a physio therapy room where she could do her exercises at home. She was already doing 4 days of intense physio at a scoliosis clinic but the doc said as much of these exercises as possible was the key! Work through the pain he said, because you only have one year to correct this! It wasn't long before my daughter started to complain about her sore back again but a different soreness. A muscle soreness. We had been using the only heating pad we had in the house to help soothe her muscles after physio but it wasn't working AT ALL! It was that blue one with its name splashed all over the fabric... you know the one!
I wasn't going to repeat the same mistake twice and land myself in The Guinness Book of World Records as the most non listening mother alive so I took to the internet and researched everything I could on homemade heating pads. I researched fillings, temp times, fabrics that worked and fabrics that didn't. I checked the websites of other sewists who designed heat packs. I stayed up until all hours of the night finding anything I could on how to make a quality heat pack that would help my daughter (and in hindsight, ease my own guilt). Mother guilt is Real ya'll! After taking notes and putting all my information together along with some common sense, I had my daughter lie down on the living room floor and measured her from the very top of her spine to her tail bone. I measured across her spinal muscles to make sure the heating pad spread across those two muscles to give her some relief. I've sewn all my life so I went to work right away.
When I was done, we put it in the microwave and shimmied it down her spine while she was in the lounge chair watching TV. Voila! I had a heat pack that was working for her. Below is a picture of that VERY FIRST FLAX PAC!
Now, keep in mind my daughter was 15 at the time. 15 year olds are the laziest creatures you'll find anywhere! They are constantly asking you to get this or get that for them. If you don't make them do it themselves, in my opinion, that can become a life long habit. So in typical mother fashion when asked "Mom, can you grab my ...fill in the blank", I gave my typical Mom answer. "No, get up and get it yourself with the legs I birthed you with, you're lucky to have them so get up and use them" LOL FYI - she can recite that phrase word for word today! And so she did. Into the kitchen walks my daughter with the pack I just made slung around her neck!! To say I had a lightbulb moment would be an understatement! I squealed out an OMG and she instantly said "what did I do"! LOL Also typical of 15 because secretly they did do SOMETHING they should be in trouble for but they have no idea which misdeed you might be talking about! I said "you finally listened and got up to get your own stuff, and you're a genius"! A few minor tweaks here and there and that guys, is how The Flax Pac was born!
"Necessity is the mother of invention"
Proverb Author Unknown