05/13/2026
She was 42. Three kids. Marketing director. Made it through her twenties on coffee and her thirties on cortisol.
By the time she came to me she was sleeping four hours a night, gaining a pound a week despite eating 1200 calories, crying in the school pickup line, and convinced she was getting early-onset dementia because she couldn't remember her own phone number.
Her primary said her labs were normal and offered an antidepressant.
Here is what was actually happening: her cortisol was so chronically elevated that her body had stopped producing progesterone in any meaningful amount. Her thyroid was converting T4 to reverse T3 instead of T3, which is a fancy way of saying her body had hit the brake pedal on her metabolism because it thought she was running from a bear for fifteen years straight.
She was not depressed. She was not lazy. She was not making it up.
She was a woman whose nervous system had been screaming for help for a decade and whose medical system handed her a prescription pad.
Six months in: sleeping seven hours. Down 22 pounds without trying. Remembered her phone number. Took her kids to the beach and stayed in the water with them instead of watching from a chair.
This is the work. This is why I do it. This is what is possible when someone actually looks.
