I help women come home to themselves.

It was June 5th, 2021. A Monday morning. 97 degrees.

My Apple Watch said 42 BPM. I tried to take my own pulse and couldn't find it. I was sitting on the couch, silently freaking out, trying not to alarm anyone — because that's what I do. My husband brought Marley to school for the last week of 6th grade and came back. He was annoyed. Not without concern — but more annoyed. "What do you want to do?" he asked.

"I think I should go to the hospital."

I crawled up the stairs to get dressed. Walking was too hard.

I called my doctor's office from the car. The nurse said I sounded fine and suggested urgent care. When we got there, I could barely walk from the parking lot — I was that out of breath. The woman at the front desk wouldn't let me sit. I had to fill out paperwork. She took her time. Eventually a very pregnant nurse came out with a wheelchair and asked if I could walk or needed a ride. I felt bad — I thought I should be pushing her. But the ego had dissolved by then. I took the ride.

We started across the city. My heart rate dropped. Tunnel vision. The walls closing in. I heard the EMT say: "Lights, please." And then lights and sirens, picking up speed across the city on a 97-degree Monday morning.

I was in the hospital for a week. Overnight, my heart rate dropped into the 20s. They put me on drips I reacted to. They eventually "stabilized" me at 34 BPM. Tuesday morning, the cardiologist came back. The routine heart catheterization became something else. As I was signing the consent form, he took my hand.

"Here's the thing," he said, matter-of-factly. "I live 20 minutes away. If I don't do this now, there's a good chance you'll code overnight and I won't make it here in time to save you."

I was 44 years old. Marley was finishing 6th grade.

Insurance had denied the MRI they wanted. So they placed a permanent pacemaker instead. It would beat my heart for me — because I had almost no electrical signal between the left side of my atria and ventricle. "Six weeks," they said, "and then back to normal."

They didn't know that normal had meant handstands. That normal meant snowboarding, running, the kind of movement where you risk a fall. All of that was gone now. My new normal had a maximum heart rate. My new normal was designed for someone 40 years older.

I am, according to every provider who has seen my case, a complete anomaly. Nothing that happened to me was caused by anything I did. My body just — did this. And kept doing it.

In January 2023, a lead in my pacemaker fractured. The device keeping my heart in rhythm had broken. We didn't know what was happening at first — the episodes looked like seizures, like strokes, like maybe I hadn't eaten enough. The ambulance crew wasn't sure.

In January 2025, I finally got that MRI — the one insurance had denied in 2021. It showed chronic inflammation. Cardiac sarcoidosis. Trips to Boston. Cardiac experts. PET scans to test for cancer. Prednisone that sent me back into an ambulance with dangerous heart rhythms. More medications. Cancer medications. Menopause hitting at the same time the treatment started — and me losing half my hair and gaining 80 pounds from the medication weight.

In May 2025, two weeks after meeting a new cardiologist in Boston, they upgraded my device from a pacemaker to a pacer-defibrillator. Two weeks from first appointment to surgery. The speed at which they moved said everything. My heart had started trying to beat on its own — and they were worried it would beat too fast and I'd go into cardiac arrest.

Through all of it — the bone-deep exhaustion, the body I no longer recognized in the mirror, the grief of everything that fell apart — I was still trying to show up for everyone else.

That's what women like us do. Until we can't anymore.