I live in downtown Vancouver with my wife Kim and our cat, Cali.
Who publishes this website?
SaveYourself.ca is mostly the work of one person, me, Paul Ingraham, a health science journalist and former Registered Massage Therapist. From 2000-2009, I had a busy massage therapy practice in Vancouver, Canada, and published SaveYourself.ca in my “spare” time. Eventually SaveYourself.ca took over, and it is now a full-time job.
Occasionally I still write fiction as well.
I am a science enthusiast, and I’m very proud and excited to be (finally!) working on completing my Bachelor of Health Science — just four more courses to go! I’ve also spent twenty years intermittently studying/playing at the Haven Institute for Professional Training, although not for some time now.
In my teens, I incorrectly believed that I had serious health problems resulting from steroids which had been prescribed to me by a physician at the Vancouver Childrens’ hospital. It took me years and many important lessons to figure out that the steroids weren’t to blame. The experience inspired my fascination with health care and human potential … and ultimately my career in massage therapy.
As I recovered, those experiences also turned into a devotion to sport, and many highly educational firsthand experiences with athletic injuries (I’ve had several). After recovering from my adolescent health problems, I discovered athletics. I became a runner, a cyclist, a hiker, and particularly an avid player of ultimate. Ultimate is a hard-running Frisbee sport, comparable to soccer in its speed and intensity. You can read more about my athletic injury experiences here.
Playing ultimate
That’s me, getting ready to “flick” the disc. A flick is a forehand throw, the opposite of what people normally do when they throw a Frisbee!
More?
My personal web presence is on Facebook. Clients and website readers are welcome to add me as a “friend” — even if I don’t know you!
The Ingrahams are a “publishy” family
My family is writerly and publishy. My parents were both English teachers, and I grew up in a home full of typewriters, red pens and vigorous, dorky debates about the proper usage of semicolons. Most other families didn’t have a single typewriter, let alone one or two for everyone. By the time I was 12, the typewriters had been replaced by Apple IIe computers. Today, we all publish websites, of course.
My mother, Susan Ingraham, became a fitness instructor after retiring from public school teaching, and (of course) she also writes about fitness: see 7 Reasons Older Adults Don’t Stay in Exercise Classes: And 7 Reasons Why they Should. She publishes stories and genealogical information about her family roots (Overturfs, Hansens, McDonalds, Mahoneys); a historical novel about the those families, Family Legacies; and a mystery novel, Justice Delayed.
My father, Bob Ingraham, is a not-so-amateur historian. His description of his own stuff: “Ephemeral Treasures is a mostly philatelic web site which reflects my interests in the early commercial aviation and the Second World War, and showcases items from my collections — old envelopes (aka covers), stamps, and postcards. But it also tells some of the adventure stories I’ve had in my life, like surviving a plane crash in New Mexico’s Black Range and being badly wounded in Vietnam when I was a Marine Corps hospital corpsman.”