INUVIK - If it were up to her, Donna Biro would stay in Inuvik for the rest of her life.

But life has a way of changing people's plans, as Biro recently discovered.

As she did four years ago, when first coming to Inuvik, registered massage therapist Donna Biro prepares to leave her home in the Delta to head back south with nothing but her massage table. - Guy Quenneville/NNSL photo

A registered massage therapist who has worked on some 150 Inuvik clients during the past four years, Biro has been pulled back to her home in North Thompson, B.C., where family obligations, a health scare and an uncertain future await.

"I have demands from home," said the 68-year-old Biro.

In 2004, Biro left her family farm 50 km north of Kamloops, where she and her husband herded sheep.

"My husband was controlling," she said.

"He knew what I ate for breakfast and when I went to bed. There was no independence, no friends, nobody around. No life except he and I. It was killing me.

"I came alone. I left my family. It was a flight to run away."

She didn't choose Inuvik on a whim, but was drawn to the Delta from a very early age.

"Ever since I was a child, I would draw pictures of the Northern lights or dog teams," she said.

In 1993, Biro experienced what she calls "a waking vision" that set her on her course to Inuvik.

"I saw a herd of caribou. They were all sparkly and white with snowflakes in their antlers. They told me to keep moving, to keep moving North," she said.

When her father died and left her an inheritance, Biro used the money to study and become a registered massage therapist at the West Coast College of Massage Therapy in Vancouver.

When farm life became too much, she fled with nothing but her massage table and started anew in Inuvik, opening her massage therapy business from her small home at 183 Gwich'in Road.

"I was like a salmon returning home to where it was spawned. That's how I felt when I came here," said Biro.

"I soon became independent and I had a business."

Her practice lead her to work on several former residential school students, who found the experience difficult at first but ultimately rewarding, said Biro.

"I've grown to believe that I'm a healer, not just a mechanical back rubber," she said.

"There was a lot of people for whom it was new."

If she has any regrets about her time in Inuvik, it's that she was never able to train an apprentice to take in the clients she's left behind.

Biro is heading back south not only to reconnect with her husband, who she hasn't seen since she left, but to also tend to her own health.

"I found out I have a heart problem. My heart just isn't pumping as much blood as it should, so I'm going down there to get looked at."

Biro's massage therapy practice won't fall by the wayside, however. She plans to work two days a week out of a naturopathic clinic in Kamloops.

As for returning home and leaving the place where she felt destined to stay, Biro has mixed feelings.

"It's sort of scary in a way. But you have to handle everything with love, no matter if it's difficult or not."