My Story: From Survival Mode to the Wellness Warrior Method

I grew up in what was once a quiet California beach town. My days were spent roller skating the strand, salt air tangling my hair, and feeling the freedom of movement in my soul. When I wasn’t skating, I was with my horses — riding hunter/jumpers that demanded discipline, resilience, and a kind of intuitive connection that taught me to listen with more than just my ears. For a time, I thought I’d become a equine veterinarian. Science and animals felt like my calling.

I graduated from Cal Poly Pomona with my BS in Pre-Veterinary Medicine knowing I was on a different path. Life had other plans. Nursing found me, and soon I was immersed in the adrenaline-fueled world of the ER where I worked as a tech while I finished up my Nursing degree.

The ER Years: Strength in Survival Mode (Nurse Burnout + Conventional Medicine Gaps)

As a trauma nurse and MICN in one of LA County’s busiest hospitals, I lived in a state most people only glimpse for minutes at a time: pure survival mode. My dopamine was adrenaline. Shift after shift, I carried stories heavier than any gurney I wheeled down the hallway.

There were triumphs I’ll never forget. Pulling a patient back from the brink of death. Watching someone walk again after TPA reversed a stroke. Racing down corridors to the cath lab, stopping a heart attack just in time.

But the victories couldn’t silence the other memories — the ones that were a more silent haunting than loosing patients after the shift was over:

• Patients lugging grocery bags full of pill bottles, with no idea what most of them were for.
• Mothers juggling sick children who had never been taught how to prevent the cycle.
• Women in front of me, exhausted, inflamed, in hormone chaos, told that another prescription — or the dismissive phrase “that’s just how it is at your age” — was the only solution.

I’ll never forget the day a hospitalist smirked when I suggested patient education mattered.
“Patients don’t really care about their health,” he said.

But I knew differently. They did care. They were just never given the tools.

That realization cracked something open inside me. It planted a seed that would only grow stronger as I saw more.

From ER to Palliative Care: Two Ends of the Spectrum (What the Healthcare System Gets Wrong)

Eventually, I stepped into palliative care. The contrast could not have been sharper. In the ER, I saw the crisis. In palliative, I saw the quiet result of decades without root cause healing. Lives shortened. Quality of life lost. Families holding the weight of disease that might have been prevented.

That shift broke me open in a new way. Emergency medicine is extraordinary at saving lives, but it does little to build health. The truth was clear: our healthcare system is sick.

• The way we teach physicians has to change.
• The way we prevent illness has to change.
• The profit-driven agendas must change.

Until then, mainstream medicine would keep symptom-chasing, and patients would keep slipping through the cracks.

And I couldn’t be part of it in the same way anymore.

And I couldn’t be part of it in the same way anymore. The calling for something deeper grew louder.

Turning Point: From Crisis Care to Root Cause Care (Functional Medicine + Holistic Healing)

So I stepped beyond the ER and began pursuing a functional health, toxin-free, root-cause approach. I studied nutrition, toxins, fitness, and the mind-body-spirit connection. I became Board Certified as a Holistic Healthcare Practitioner, earned my Nurse Coach credential, and started my own healing journey outside the walls of the hospital.

But even before I had the language for functional medicine, I knew something was broken. I’ll never forget sitting beside my mom in front of the cardiologist I worked alongside. He told her she could “just keep drinking her wine to relax” — as if alcohol was a harmless prescription. My stomach dropped. Even then, I knew that advice was dangerous. Years later, losing her to stroke cemented what I already felt in my bones: our system wasn’t built for healing, it was built for managing. And management is never enough.

That realization wasn’t just professional — it became personal. Because at the same time I was watching patients and my own mother slip through the cracks, my own health was unraveling.

This wasn’t just a career shift. It was the unraveling of everything I thought health was — and the rebuilding of what true healing could be.

My Own Breaking Point (Hormone Chaos, Inflammation, and Burnout in Women over 40)

Meanwhile, my own health was unraveling.

Decades of ER shifts, toxins, and survival-mode living had left me anxious, inflamed, exhausted, and disconnected from myself.

Yes, I had been following keto for over twenty years. But I was doing it wrong — macro-blind, scale-obsessed, chasing skinny instead of strength. I didn’t understand the damage that toxins, inflammatory foods, and chronic stress were doing to my body and spirit.

I thought I was “healthy.” In reality, I was breaking.  And deep down, I knew I couldn’t keep numbing, ignoring, or pushing through. Something had to change.

The Shift: Clean Keto, Ketovore, and Reconnection (Anti-Inflammatory Nutrition for Women)

Everything changed when I embraced clean keto and ketovore living. Not a diet. Not a trend. But food as information. Food as healing.

This wasn’t about obsessing over carbs or calories. It was about removing toxins, lowering inflammation, and feeding my body the nutrient-dense, whole-food framework it had been starving for. It was about giving up key toxins like alcohol that I had clung on to for so long. Honestly I had just had enough of the cycles and knew there was a better way to live.

The results were undeniable:

• My blood sugar stabilized.
• Energy returned — steady, not spiking and crashing.
• The stiffness and pain I had carried melted away.
• Brain fog lifted, and clarity returned.
• My hormones began balancing even as I moved through perimenopause.
• And perhaps most importantly, I felt a reconnection between body, mind, and spirit that I hadn’t known in years.

For the first time in a long time, I was home in myself.

And once I felt it, I couldn’t ignore it.

Beyond Food: Toxins and Trauma (Detox + Mind-Body-Spirit Healing)

But food alone wasn’t the whole story.

The deeper I went, the more I saw the silent saboteurs everywhere:

• Seed oils in packaged foods.
• Alcohol taxing the liver and hormones.
• Plastics and endocrine disruptors in everyday products.
• Hidden chemicals in beauty, cleaning, and even “wellness” items.

And then there were the toxins we don’t see under a microscope — the emotional ones. The trauma, the grief, the generational stress stored in the body.

I began to connect the dots. The hip pain. The hormone chaos. The stubborn weight. The autoimmune flares. These weren’t just random symptoms. They were the body speaking the soul’s unprocessed language.

True healing had to address it all — body, mind, and spirit. And that truth led me to build something new.

The Birth of the Wellness Warrior Method (Root-Cause Health Framework for Women)

This is why I created the Wellness Warrior Method — a seven-step framework for women ready to reset, reclaim, and rise.

It’s not about fixing you. It’s about remembering you.

The Wellness Warrior Method integrates:

• Functional lab testing (hormones, gut health, nutrient panels, inflammation markers) for clarity and personalization.
• Clean keto, ketovore, and whole-food nutrition to reset inflammation and fuel the body.
• Detox and drainage support to clear hidden blocks.
• Gut, hormone, and immune system restoration to rebuild resilience.
• Nervous system alignment and chiropractic care (with my husband, Dr. Gail Kelley, DC) to ground and regulate.
• Movement and strength training to reclaim power and energy.
• Tools for releasing trauma and reconnecting body, mind, and spirit.

This is not another diet plan. It’s not a quick fix. It’s a roadmap — grounded in science, guided by soul, and built for women who are done settling for survival.

Why Women (Perimenopause, Hormone Balance, and Energy Reset Over 40)

I focus on women in their 40s and beyond because I’ve lived it. The exhaustion. The hormone swings. The cultural lies that tell us to pour from empty cups until we’re empty ourselves.

I know what it feels like to numb with wine or busyness. To feel betrayed by your own body. To silence the whispers until they become screams.

But I also know the freedom of reclaiming health.

And I see the same struggles showing up earlier now — in women in their 30s, already burned out, inflamed, exhausted. The path forward is the same at any age: clear the toxins, reset the foundations, and reclaim the freedom you were created for.

Why Work With Me (Nurse Wellness Warrior Approach to Functional Health)

I am not here to hand you another meal plan or bottle of supplements.

I am here to give you the tools, education, and empowerment I wish every ER patient had been handed.

I bring the clinical edge of nursing and functional labs, the holistic depth of body-mind-spirit healing, and the lived experience of walking this journey myself.

I am the Nurse Wellness Warrior. And I am here to remind you:

✨ You were not created just to carry. You were created to thrive. ✨

This is my story. This is my why. And this is the work I now pour into every woman who walks through Eagle Freedom Health.

Because survival mode is not the end of your story. Rising is.