Taking Charge of Your Health Doesn’t Mean Going It Alone

A few years ago, I nearly died.

For months leading up to that moment, I told my doctors something was wrong with me. I could feel it. But my symptoms — most significantly, a constant fatigue that made it difficult to get through the day — were minimized, appointment after appointment. “Stress,” they said. “Hormonal shifts.”

Desperate to feel like myself again, I tried managing the symptoms on my own with supplements and herbs.

Then, one day in 2021, my life changed forever.

What had been a slow, confusing decline suddenly turned into something far scarier. I ended up in the hospital, separated from my sons who were just six and seven, by COVID-19 restrictions. A week later, I was allowed to go home, though doctors still had no definitive answers as to why I was so sick.

I felt an overwhelming sense of relief to be with my family again. But during dinner that night, my doctor called. My labs revealed worrying results. I needed to return to the hospital.

I burst into tears.

“How could this be happening to me?” I thought. I was always so health conscious. I ate well, exercised regularly, and researched everything before putting it into my body. When I started feeling “off,” I consulted experts across the country and studied scientific journals like a first-year medical student. Yet, somehow, here I was gravely ill.

Leaving my husband and boys again was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. But I knew my life was at risk. So, three hours after being discharged, I returned to the hospital. When my medical team couldn’t figure out what was wrong, I was transferred to another facility. I spent so many nights alone in my hospital room, overwhelmed by sadness, frustration, and fear that no one would ever figure out what was making me so sick.

Eventually, after weeks in the hospital, doctors did. I was experiencing a severe immune reaction to the supplements and herbs I had been taking to combat my debilitating fatigue. My liver was failing. When I got the news, I had so many questions:

“How was this not caught sooner?”

“Would I need a transplant?”

“Would I need to be on medication for the rest of my life?”

It took years of high-dose steroids to stabilize my immune system and, eventually, restore my health and liver function. Ultimately, my doctors traced the original symptoms back to a gut imbalance.

Surprisingly, the hardest part of this whole saga wasn’t the illness itself. It was realizing that my near-death experience might have been avoided if I had an easier way to track my symptoms, to find patterns that could pinpoint their potential causes, to understand how the supplements and herbs were contributing to my declining health, and to share that information with my doctors so we could get to the bottom of what was happening to me.

That’s why I created MyPattern: to help you gain a clearer view of what’s happening inside your body with accessible information in plain language; affordable lab testing tailored to your specific needs; detailed analysis and personalized guidance to help you navigate issues like hormones, fertility, cycle health, perimenopause, and menopause. You deserve it all, in one place, so you can start asking your clinicians better questions and making informed decisions that are based on your biology, not a generic average.

As women, we know our bodies better than anyone. We sense the shifts and the signals that are hard to name but impossible to ignore. But, for generations, we also have been conditioned to endure, to downplay symptoms and figure things out on our own. My cautionary tale serves as a reminder that we don’t have to. Taking charge of your health isn’t about navigating it alone. It’s about seeking answers, tracking trends, and partnering with a trusted clinician to help you get the whole picture and find your pattern.