About me

My childhood nickname was “little Gloria Steinem.”

While most children were dreaming of being astronauts or firefighters, I was dreaming of being a reporter, to the point where by age five I was investigating and interviewing my mother, named my only childhood pets (two beta fish) Woodward and Bernstein, and proudly started my first newspaper in sixth grade, “Speak up!,” fancying myself a young Katharine Graham.

Every day, I eagerly listened to my foremothers of news on the radio: Linda Wertheimer, Susan Stamberg, Nina Totenberg and Cokie Roberts on NPR. I had a special fascination with Totenberg, who stood out to me as a hard-hitting court reporter.

When I finally earned a real taste of reporting with my first internship in high school at the weekly city newspaper, I was hooked. My scientific mind had bloomed along the way, and I pursued a double major of biology and journalism at Indiana University with the intention of being a health and science journalist.

By age 23, I was the youngest health editor at the Monroe Evening News in Monroe, Mich, where I pushed local health content to the forefront and, together with the design editor, revamped a monthly kids’ section as the in-demand monthly Your Health For Kids.

The news industry changed a lot since I was that young editor, and in 2006, as the writing on the both the economic and industry wall showed a downturn was on the way, I entered a two-year intensive nursing program to bolster my skills. When I graduated in December 2008, not only were the newsroom jobs hard to find, but my fellow nursing graduates were not getting hired as RNs. I scraped by the next few years with a combination of nursing and freelance jobs, sometimes working fulltime as a nurse. In fact, before I knew it, I had climbed my way to nursing manager and nursing director ­– and it was cutting into my freelancing time. I wasn’t truly a nurse; I was a health reporter. Finally, I left the ventilators behind and returned to a paper just outside of Columbus, Ohio, in the growing exurb of Delaware County.

For a couple of years, I worked fulltime covering police, courts and, for the first time, worked the paper’s health/medical desk. The timing couldn’t have been more right: I was there in time for both a small outbreak of measles and a sizable outbreak of mumps in Central Ohio. And as reporter covering public health, the issues of vaccines, the health risks of heat emergencies, the first time we’d heard the words “polar vortex,” sex trafficking in Central Ohio and opioid use all fell on my beat. For the first time, I was also required to take my own photos, and soon I was taking photos for the entire paper ­– eventually winning an award for photography.

Sadly, after a couple of years, my body said enough. For my entire life, I’d been fighting to push away symptoms I couldn’t explain. While working, I tried to hide them from my editors and, more importantly, from myself. It often resulted in my heart racing so fast that I’d pass out – and sometimes stop breathing – while on assignment. Or I’d be stricken with a headache I couldn’t explain and be forced to sleep in a defunct darkroom. I was always sick to my stomach, and always falling and spraining joints.

I eventually left the fulltime position at the paper – maintaining a freelance relationship – and took a work-at-home call center job. For a couple of years, I worked for the company, again working my way up to trainer and manager, all while freelancing on the side. I still had no good answers about my health.

Then in 2017, one fateful August evening, during rush hour traffic, while I waited to turn right from an access road onto the busy divided street, a driver of a large SUV left the scene of an accident she had just caused and hit me head on. As my car slammed backward into the car waiting behind me, I was rendered unconscious. Although my car was totaled, and I was left with a traumatic brain injury, I survived – with no other injuries.

After a year of physical and occupational therapy to help me regain my balance and function and speech therapy for my memory, I realized that my underlying condition – the one that had no name, the one I had been trying to hide – had worsened. I also wanted to understand how I had survived a terrible crash with only a head injury.

I put my health journalism (and a few nursing) skills to use. I carefully collected data on myself. I read study after study and compared my symptoms and body to what I knew and didn’t know. It took another few years – until late 2021 – but when the dam broke, the diagnosis and associated conditions came fast and furious: Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a genetic connective tissue disease, with associated multivalvular disease and aortic insufficiency, a high genetic probability for heritable thoracic aortic aneurysm and dissection (hTAAD), inappropriate sinus tachycardia, gastroparesis, osteoarthritis and microdeficiencies.

Now, with diagnoses in hand, I am able to get the right treatments in place. Some of that is medication; some of it is mobility equipment and joint bracing; some of it is yearly scans to make sure nothing in the body has hit the self-destruct button yet. It’s a balancing act, and with balance and maintenance, I’m able to finally return to what I love doing most: health and medical journalism.

Now, I’m freelancing from Boston, Mass. This allows me to both optimally maintain my health with the best experts in my disease. The professional upside? The Greater Boston Area is the cradle of medical research and med tech innovation. It’s also home to some of the top experts in just about every field of health and medicine. That’s a work-life balance win-win.