For the past seven years, I’ve been navigating something I didn’t have a name for: night sweats that soaked through my sheets, sleep that wouldn’t come, ADHD symptoms that seemed to appear out of nowhere, a libido that had quietly vanished, and pain during sex that no one could explain.

I’m a double board-certified nurse practitioner. I’ve spent 18 years in primary care. And even I couldn’t get a straight answer.

Here’s what I heard instead, from provider after provider:

• “You’re too young for that.”
• “Your periods are too normal.”
• “Your vagina looks healthy.”
• “Have you tried coconut oil?”
• “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”
• “Your testosterone level is normal.”
• “It’s not normal to dream about sex if you’re a woman.”
• “You should try pellets.”
• “Your grandmother had breast cancer, so you can’t have hormones.”
• “You went through menopause at 36 because you had your kids too close together.”

Read that list again. Some of it is dismissive. Some of it is just wrong. And some of it — the comment about dreaming, the comment about my grandmother, the comment about my own children somehow causing early menopause — isn’t grounded in anything I recognize from medicine. It’s the kind of thing that gets said when a provider doesn’t have an answer and doesn’t want to admit it.

I want to be honest about something: even with my training, even knowing what questions to ask and what data to push for, it still took me years to get real answers. If it was this hard for me, I can only imagine what it’s like for the women I see every week who don’t have a clinical background to fall back on — who are told they’re “too young,” that their labs are “normal,” that it’s “just stress,” and who leave the appointment with nothing but a suggestion to try coconut oil.

That gap — between what women are actually experiencing and what the healthcare system is willing to take seriously — is the reason Healing in NM exists.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

I wish someone had told me that “normal” labs don’t mean nothing is happening — hormone levels shift and symptoms can be very real even when a single snapshot in time looks unremarkable. I wish someone had taken my sleep, my mood, my libido, and my pain seriously as connected pieces of the same picture, instead of routing me to a different specialist for each symptom with no one looking at the whole of it. And I wish someone had simply believed me the first time, instead of the tenth.

That’s the standard I hold myself to now. When a patient tells me something is wrong, my first assumption is that she’s right, and my job is to find out why — not to reach for the easiest explanation that lets the visit end early.

Why I’m Sharing This

I don’t share this story because it’s easy. It’s genuinely uncomfortable to be this specific about my own body, my own sex life, my own years of not having answers, especially publicly, as the person who’s supposed to have the answers now.

But I think the discomfort is the point. Menopause, ADHD, low libido, sexual pain — these are still topics we’re taught to whisper about, if we talk about them at all. And that silence is exactly what let so many of the comments on that list go unchallenged for years. Silence is what makes “if you don’t use it, you lose it” sound like medical advice instead of what it actually is.

If my story helps even one woman push back the next time she’s told her labs are normal and there’s nothing more to discuss, or gives her the words to ask for a second opinion instead of accepting the first dismissal — then sharing this was worth every uncomfortable second.

You deserve a provider who treats your symptoms as real, connects the dots across your hormones and your mental health instead of separating them, and gives you the time to actually be heard. That’s what I built this practice to do — because it’s what I spent seven years looking for myself.

If any part of this resonates with you, I’d love to talk. You can schedule a consultation here.