My Story

Two Words

Over the years, I’ve made a lot of emergency room visits that ended with some version of the same two words.

“You likely had an ovarian cyst rupture.” Go home.

“It’s just an ovarian cyst, it will go away on its own.” Go home.

And once, my freshman year of college: “It’s an ovarian cyst, and it’s twisting your ovary, and we need to do surgery now.” That one was seven centimeters, torsing my left ovary. I had told the doctor it felt like an elephant was stepping on me. When it was over, he said: “I can’t believe you’ve been walking around like this.”

I could believe it. Walking around like this was the only version of life I knew.

When you grow up in a body like mine, your pain scale stops working. Years later, maxed out on Pitocin during labor, I told a nurse, “It just feels like I’m a little bloated.” Nobody recalibrates you. You just keep walking around like this.

The First Look

They went in looking for endometriosis when I was a teenager. They didn’t find it. What they found was interstitial cystitis, and what they told my parents was that it likely wouldn’t be a problem until adulthood. Birth control for the cramps, follow-ups later, back to eighth grade.

The endometriosis they went looking for back then was finally confirmed in 2019. Excised, too. Eighteen years after somebody first suspected it. There was an ablation in 2022. And in between: the ER visits, the two words, the elephant, the walking around.

By my mid-thirties I had also built a whole life on top of it all. A leadership career. I was a director running four departments. Teams, strategy, exceptional reviews. My professional network had no idea I had chronic conditions. I hid them, and I was good at it. What it cost lived at home: a partnership that slid from 50/50 to 10/90, a husband who came to appointments because brain fog meant I couldn’t reliably remember what I’d come to say, and who spent a year asking me to rest before my body finally made the decision for me.

Before

A typical day, near the end: wake from four or five hours of broken sleep. At least one night a week I was up the entire night. Work a full day. Teams, strategy, deadlines. All of it from a reclined chair (or the couch) with my heating pad, because this was the only way to budget the pain. By evening, done — not tired, done. I sat through every shower because I couldn’t stand straight for more than a few minutes without getting dizzy. My belly would swell like an expanding balloon, tender to the touch. Knife-like pain. A body staging a full revolt.

And the whole time, I was tracking. An Oura ring. An Apple Watch. A period tracker. Spreadsheets, notes, scraps of paper. Mountains of data, scattered everywhere, none of it connected into anything a doctor could use in fifteen minutes.

The end came fast. On May 31, 2025, I couldn’t finish a strategy deck for the first time in my career. I sent an email. Not an apology, just “here’s what’s needed to move forward without me.” Then I went to the hospital instead of home.

On June 2, I walked into a specialist appointment I’d waited four months for, carrying six pages I’d spent weeks assembling by hand from years of scattered tracking. Once everything was in one place, the patterns were just there: intense workouts, high-stress stretches, specific cycle phases, things I’d lived through a hundred times and never once seen, because you cannot see a pattern from inside a single bad day. I walked in with evidence instead of adjectives. Her visit summary read: “patient meticulously tracked patterns, medications and results.” She believed me. Surgery went on the calendar.

Two days later, I got on a plane for a long-planned family trip to the Middle East, with surgery on the calendar for August and “just in case” antibiotics in my bag. What nobody knew: an ovarian cyst was growing the whole time. Ten days later I was on a bathroom floor in Abu Dhabi, the region was escalating toward war, and we were changing flights to get home. I was in a wheelchair at the airport. Surgery moved up to June 24: a robotic hysterectomy, another endometriosis excision, an endometrioma out with it.

The same hospital system that had spent years telling me some version of “go home, it’s a cyst” wheeled me into an OR because of one.

August 15, 2025

Seven weeks post-op, the day before I was scheduled to return to work — brain finally on, body finally quieter — my phone rang. I was laid off. I never went back at all. Never got to say goodbye to my team. I was just gone.

After the shock came something I didn’t expect: relief. And then the thought that reorganized my life: I can build the thing I needed on June 2nd, and this time it won’t take weeks of work and a near-collapse to create.

I started building Penny that same month, from the couch, mid-recovery.

The Winter

Recovery was supposed to be an ending. It was a doorway into a different hallway.

In the year after my hysterectomy, I had nearly forty appointments: urogynecology, procedures, pelvic floor physical therapy, pain management, labs, imaging, and eventually my first-ever chiropractor, three times a week. Urodynamics that October found my bladder held far more than it should and wouldn’t empty properly. I had a full vasovagal episode during the test — to this day, the nurses in that office watch me like hawks, water and a snack at the ready. The flare afterward radiated from my hips to the bottom of my rib cage. Lying on my side felt like a rock in my belly, like lying on my side while pregnant, except I don’t have a uterus anymore. A cystoscopy showed a bladder so covered in bright red vessels that I came home saying the inside of me looked as irritated as I felt. And structurally, it was fine. No lesions. No smoking gun. Story of my life.

Pelvic floor PT deserves its own sentence, because nobody warns you about any of it, including walking through hospital security carrying a bag of dilators. It scared me. It still scares me; I get anxious before every appointment, and I go anyway, because it’s what my body needs. By November, my PT’s progress note recorded that the “lightning bolt” sensation was gone. My own words, the ones I’d used to describe the pain, quoted back to me from a medical record.

December looked genuinely better. The chart from that visit says so. Then came February.

By early February 2026 I was 90% lying down, every single day, only comfortable horizontal, belly swollen, my whole body convinced it was a five-alarm fire. I spent my days on the couch with a heating pad, trying to distract myself from the pain, because nobody would give me stronger pain medication, and I was afraid to ask for it. I feared they would think I was drug-seeking. If you live with chronic pain, you know that fear. It keeps so many of us quiet, right when we most need to speak up.

On Valentine’s Day weekend, I ended up in the emergency room. Heart rate 147. Dehydrated. Potassium so low they ran IV bags. They treated me for a kidney infection; the culture came back clean two days later.

Here’s the part I actually want you to know about that night: I lay in that hospital bed logging everything into Penny. The app wasn’t even public yet. I was its founder and its user, tracking my own emergency in the thing I’d built because of the last emergency. I even found a bug.

249 Days

Penny went live in the App Store on April 21, 2026 — 249 days after the layoff. I built all of it inside the year I just described: mostly from my bed or my couch, in the hours the pain allowed, on Zoom with our founding engineer across time zones. My husband ran the house around me the entire time. He fed me, reminded me at 4am that sleep is important, and came to every appointment, asking the doctors the questions I forgot or was too scared to ask.

I didn’t get a real pain plan until nineteen days before launch. My first pain-management appointment was April 2nd, with a specialist who spent 45 minutes with me, read every other doctor’s records, and pressed on the exact places that hurt. The regimen that followed, a nerve-pain medication, gave me my first uninterrupted nights of sleep in months, within days.

I got off the couch the same week the app went live. Those two things happened together, and I only saw the symmetry later.

Now

A typical day now: I’m up early and working on Penny before my day job starts. Evenings are mom life. Then Penny again. I take medication three times a day on a strict schedule, because that regimen is what makes this life physically possible. I still track, in my own app. Some days I ride my electric trike around the neighborhood. It’s the accommodation I finally let myself have, so I can get outside without asking my body for more than it wants to give.

I went back to work in June 2026, a year after my hysterectomy. It was not a return to the old life. Stress was one of the patterns I found on those six pages, and my old job ran on it. I never once counted that as a health problem. In the ten months in between, I learned to rest, and I learned to listen to my body. So I was picky about where I landed next. Extremely picky. I turned down several offers and chose the one that felt like a deep breath, not more weight on my shoulders. That wasn’t ambition cooling off. It’s part of what keeps my pain manageable alongside the medication.

My husband carried our entire life for more than a year without once making me feel like a burden; that fear only ever lived in my head. I’m participating as an equal partner at home more now, because pain isn’t taking up all the room anymore. Date night is back. For a long stretch, my boys got the lying-down version of me. The one who left their school events early to sit in the car. The one who said no because my body had already said it. That year showed me something in them I wouldn’t trade. They’re gentle with people who are hurting, and nobody has to ask them to be. They ask about the app, too; once, as I talked through a pile of ideas out loud, they gave me their first piece of business advice: “Pick a lane, mom.” (Noted.) They’re why I hold my boundaries now: being present for life with my kids is something I will never sacrifice again.

What Penny Is

Penny is a bladder diary and flare tracker. You log what’s happening. It shows you what’s showing up over time. It turns that into something organized you can hand to your doctor.

It’s a wellness tracking tool, not a medical device. It doesn’t diagnose anything, doesn’t recommend treatment, and doesn’t replace your care team. It closes the distance between what you’re living and what fits into a fifteen-minute appointment. My own words ended up in my own medical records because I tracked well enough to be quotable. I want that for you.

When I started talking to people about what I was building, I heard the same sentence over and over: “we really need a tool like this.” The first time I saw a stranger share Penny on TikTok, I cried. A woman struggling in the same hell I’d been in, telling her people about it unprompted. The early App Store reviews say things like “can’t wait to show my doctor,” and my favorite: “I can share this with my Dr in a detailed report. Look. It’s all right here.” That’s a stranger describing the exact moment I built this for. Six pages that took me weeks to assemble by hand, now a button.

Penny is early. There’s no marketing budget and no growth team; there’s me, learning SEO at night and working up the courage to share all of this. It’s a slow, slow climb. But I won’t give up on it. I want Penny to be the resource every pelvic floor physical therapist hands their patients. I want urologists and gynecologists to hand it to the woman whose UTI symptoms keep coming back with negative cultures, so she walks back in with clear data instead of starting from zero. I want the fifteen-minute appointment to change, from a rushed attempt to capture everything into a review of the data and a strategy for what’s next. And I want a woman to be able to look at her own log and believe herself when she says it’s been hard.

The healthcare system is broken, and it’s broken for providers too. They’re seeing too many patients with too little time. If we meet them where they are, with the right information organized the right way, everyone wins.

Still In It

I don’t have an ending for you. My conditions are permanent. Most days they’re well managed. I couldn’t have said that a year ago. And I’m still in it, still tracking, still learning, right alongside everyone else.

Maybe you’re somewhere in your own eighteen years, waiting on someone to confirm the thing you already know. You matter. It’s okay to trust your body, and to listen to it. You are not alone. And you have more power here than you’ve been told. It starts with writing it down.

I won’t promise it gets better, because nobody can promise you that. But when you finally get in front of someone who listens, you’ll have something to put on the table.

That part I know for certain. It’s in my chart.