Most of what I know, I learned from people who had been told there was not much left to do.
I’ve been a nurse since 2015. I started on a cardiac telemetry unit at Lutheran Hospital, caring for people whose hearts had been under strain for decades. From there I moved into the operating room as a circulator at St. Joseph Hospital, then to surgical prep and recovery at Parkview Health, where I stayed until I moved into practice as a nurse practitioner.
I earned my Bachelor of Science in Nursing at Purdue University and my Master of Science in Nursing at the University of Saint Francis, and became a board-certified Family Nurse Practitioner in 2021.
My first role as an NP was in addiction medicine, treating opioid, alcohol, and polysubstance use disorder in clinic and by telemedicine. That year taught me more about behavior and change than any course I’ve taken. It’s also where I stopped believing that people struggle because they lack willpower.
Since 2022 I’ve worked in physical medicine and rehabilitation, caring for medically complex adults across three skilled nursing facilities. People come to me after strokes, surgeries, heart failure, kidney disease, cancer treatment. Many arrive unable to stand on their own. My job is to help them get function back. I’ve watched people do it at 62 and at 88, and I still do this work every week.
That is the part of my career that shaped everything else. When you spend years watching bodies recover under difficult circumstances, you stop believing that health is something you either have or you don’t. The body keeps responding. It responds to protein, to muscle, to sleep, to blood sugar, to hormones, to stress, to how much you move. It responds at 45 and it responds at 75. What changes is how deliberate you have to be about it.
So I went looking for the tools to work further upstream. I completed my functional medicine certification, along with separate certifications in hormone management and prescribing, weight management, men’s health, and longevity. The training is the newest part of my background. The clinical work behind it is not. I’ve been managing thyroid disease, insulin resistance, hormone changes, and metabolic disease for years inside conventional medicine. What changed was how much time I wanted to spend actually understanding the person in front of me.
That’s why I started Reclaim Power Telehealth. I wanted to practice medicine where the goal is your energy, your strength, and your ability to do the things you actually want to do, for as long as possible. I see adults in Indiana, Colorado, Utah, Washington, and Arizona, and I speak English and Vietnamese.
Most people come to me wanting to feel better than they do right now. That is almost always a reasonable thing to want, and it’s almost never too late to ask.
Your body is not storing fat at random, or waking you at 4am to be difficult.
Every system in it — hormones, gut, liver, nervous system — is quietly answering the same question all day: is it safe to burn energy right now? Say yes and you have fuel, focus, a metabolism that adapts. Say no, because of stress or poor sleep or inflammation or years of dieting, and the body stores instead, and turns hunger up so you do not run out. That is not a willpower problem. That is a three hundred thousand year old survival system doing its job in a body nobody has asked, out loud, whether it feels safe. If a plan has not worked for you before, the plan was wrong for your body, not the other way around.
Five steps, in this order, because the order matters. Doing step four before step one is why most plans fail.