The woman whose pain persists after technically successful surgery.
The MRI is clean. The surgeon did good work. The pain came back — or never left. That gap is where most patients get told there's nothing more to do.
You probably found me because you have already tried the things you were supposed to try.
You have been on birth control since you were a teenager. You have seen more than one specialist. You have been told, more than once, that your tests look normal. You have a heating pad at work and Advil in your bag for the days you cannot get through without it. You may have had a laparoscopy. You may have flown somewhere for an excision. The surgery may have worked for a while. It may not have. Either way, you are reading this page, which means you are still looking.
I was the patient you are now.
I had two excision surgeries in six months — the second with one of the most respected endometriosis excision surgeons in the world. I flew to the Mayo Clinic for a second opinion. I had been on birth control since I was a teenager. I followed every protocol the right doctors gave me. I had spent more than $125,000.
And I was still in pain. I had had SIBO for five years that no one had connected to my endo. My hormones were a mess. My sleep was broken. My anxiety was constant. My bloating was bad enough that some days I looked six months pregnant. And, on top of all of that, endo was impacting my marriage and eventually ended it.
By the time I was 30, my surgeons told me a hysterectomy was probably my last remaining option. I almost said yes. I am grateful I did not.
I had received the standard of care from the best providers in the country, and I still had every problem I had walked in with. So I went looking for training the gynecologists, pain specialists, gastroenterologists, and surgeons could not give me. I had to learn pain neuroscience, and why my pain had become its own disease independent of my lesions. I had to learn somatics across multiple disciplines, and the truth that chronic pain teaches you to leave your body without your permission, and that coming back is the keystone for everything else. I had to learn how the food I ate, the sleep I missed, and the way I worked were quietly feeding the inflammation. I had to learn how to regulate a nervous system that had spent decades in fight-or-flight. I had to learn how trauma lived in my pelvis. I had to learn what boundaries were, and that their absence had been a chronic dose of cortisol I did not know I was taking.
Conventional medicine did not have the language, or the time in a 12-minute visit, to teach any of that. So I learned it. And then I built it into a clinical model, because no patient should have to figure this out alone.
Today, endometriosis is a diagnosis I carry. It is not something I struggle with.
What I do
The Luteal Health practice exists because of one observation: endometriosis is not a gynecological disease. It is a systemic disease that happens to manifest in the pelvis. The pain has three mechanisms running through it (nociceptive, nociplastic, neuropathic). The systemic side has six body systems feeding into it (gut, hormones, nervous system, mind/body, lifestyle, and immune function). Most patients have all of them running at once. Almost no clinician maps them. No patient gets out of pain by treating one at a time.
That is the work. The Endo Pain Signature maps which pain types and which systems are driving your case. The Endo Recovery Protocol treats all six in coordinated care over four months. Both pages explain the structure in detail.
What I bring to your case
I am a board-certified nurse practitioner trained at UCSF, with advanced certifications in functional medicine, pain reprocessing therapy, hormone optimization through WorldLink Medical, peptide therapy through A4M, and relational training through the Somatica Institute. The full credential breakdown is in the section below.
I am also a voracious reader. There are entire bodies of clinical knowledge I do not hold a certification in, and I read them every week anyway, because my patients deserve a clinician who is current, not a clinician who is comfortable.
What I did not have, and what almost cost me my uterus and did cost me my marriage, was one provider who could see all six systems at once and treat them as the connected disease they actually are. That is the role I now play for my patients.
