Hello

My Story

When reflecting on my health journey, my initial response was to say that it started when trying to conceive my daughter in 2020, however when reflecting further, it actually probably started much earlier than that. When I was in high school,  I experienced fainting episodes. It was found that I had low blood sugar and my thyroid levels were off. I was given medication but was not given any insight as to why this might be happening to me. Neither of these are extremely common for a teenage girl, but there was no additional support or testing to get to the root cause. The meds made me feel jittery and shaky and eventually I made the executive decision to take myself off of them as my doctors were not listening to my concerns. 

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After going several years with little issues, I really started to notice that there was something off within my body when I was having difficulty getting pregnant. I advocated for various tests to be completed and was diagnosed with Hashimoto's and PCOS. The next step was to pursue medicated cycles according to the doctors. I was not super excited about taking the medications so I took matters into my own hands and did some research to support my body with lifestyle changes and supplementation. We were able to conceive but lost our first pregnancy. I continued to make changes and got pregnant with my daughter in November of 2021. 

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Pregnancy itself was uneventful, but I started to notice some changes within my body a few months postpartum. I was dead tired. I was losing a significant amount of weight. I was feeling like my mind was clouded all the time. I did not think much of it at first. I just blamed it on being postpartum and breast feeding and sleep deprivation. 

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Then other symptoms started to happen as well like muscle weakness, intermittent fevers, joint pain and mouth ulcers. That was when I started to seek answers from a traditional medical setting as I could no longer write this off as "just postpartum". I was sent to nephrologist for decreased kidney function and diagnosed with something called FSGS, a rare kidney disorder, but my doctor was unable to find a cause, so treatment was essentially like throwing darts in the dark. I was also referred to a rheumatologist, cardiologist, and endocrinologist, all of whom ran their own slew of tests with no answers. 

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Again I was on my own. I felt defeated and hopeless.  I had kind of accepted that fact that this might just be my life from now on. However, the more I thought about life staying the same, the more angry I became about how low my quality of life would be and how much I would miss out on due to not feeling well. That's when I turned to functional medicine. I got more comprehensive testing done to give me a full picture. I made dietary and lifestyle modifications. I optimized my stress and my sleep. And slowly I started to feel better. I started to feel more like me again, rather than the shell I was feeling like. My weight loss stabilized. My clouded brain cleared. I had energy to be physically and mentally present with my family. 

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I still do not have answers from a traditional medicine perspective, but functional medicine gave me my life back. Now I am on a mission to help other women who have been dismissed, told their labs are normal, or that it's just motherhood when they feel like their body is off. 

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I believe that every person is the expert in what their body is experiencing and it is my job as the functional medicine practitioner to be the expert in helping connect the dots of their health history, their symptoms, and their circumstances to then come up with an individualized plan of action for additional information and testing that may be needed, nutritional and supplementation support, and lifestyle modifications that may be beneficial in addressing the root cause. I then walk hand in hand with my clients every step of the way on their journey back to feeling like themselves again.