My story

In December 2020, my life changed in a week.

I caught Covid, and then shingles on top of it. The shingles didn't just give me a rash. It attacked my nervous system, and my face, scalp, eye, ear, jaw and neck burned with pain like nothing I'd ever known. The two infections together left me with total brain fog. I went from climbing mountains to not being able to walk, from sharp, strategic and always on to not being able to get out of bed. Filling the washing machine became a five-hour ordeal.

After a month I wasn't improving — I was getting worse. My doctors had no plan for me. They gave me a 5% chance of recovery and told me to accept my new reality.

I want to tell you what I did instead. But first I have to tell you what came before, because the illness didn't come from nowhere. It almost never does.

The life that got me there

For as long as I could remember, my life had been a performance. Baker, archaeologist, town planner, corporate strategist — always achieving, always pushing, always becoming whoever I thought the world needed me to be.

The corporate work was brutal and intoxicating: high-stakes strategy for global tech companies, constant travel, impossible deadlines. The pressure felt like purpose. I was good at it and people needed me, and I mistook that for being well.

At home, things were quietly falling apart. My marriage was unhappy, so I worked harder — work was where I went to feel wanted. I was a textbook workaholic, but I called it ambition.

And underneath all of it sat things I'd never properly faced. I lost my dad to cancer when I was seventeen, and despite therapy, the grief was still there — buried under busyness and achievement. There were years of clinical depression I managed rather than addressed. I numbed what I couldn't face and pushed through what I couldn't numb.

For years my body sent signals — gut problems, broken sleep, a stress level I'd stopped noticing because it never switched off. I ignored every one of them. I thought pushing through was strength.

Then my body stopped asking.

What I did with the 5%

Somewhere in those first bed-bound months, I made a decision: whatever recovery would take, I was going to do it. Everything was on the table. Nothing was off-limits.

I researched obsessively, in the ten-minute windows the brain fog allowed. I rebuilt my life piece by piece — sleep, food, movement, stress — testing everything against one question: is this helping me recover, or not?

The physical work mattered. But it wasn't the deepest work.

The deepest work was facing an uncomfortable truth: most of my life hadn't been making me healthier — it had been slowly wearing me down. The job that made me feel valuable. The marriage I was straining to hold together. The person I performed instead of the person I was. My body hadn't malfunctioned. It had been overworked — for decades — and it had finally enforced its limits.

So the recovery wasn't just protocols. It was going back through the patterns that got me there — the pushing through, the people-pleasing, the grief I'd never given its time — and changing them, one by one, at a pace my body could trust.

The improvements came in waves. First I could think again. Then walk further. Then the pain began to recede. My energy returned. My gut healed after twenty years of trouble. Seven months after being bed-bound, I returned to work — and did some of the best work of my career, without abandoning myself to do it.

Where I am now

Five years on, I'm healthier than I have ever been — including before I got ill.

I went from bed-bound to marathon runner. I say that carefully. You don't need to run anywhere and I'm not special, I'm physically very average, and I was at absolute zero when I started. I say it because it's the honest range of what I know recovery can be, and because when someone tells you 5%, it matters to know what the 5% can look like.

I still have some nerve damage around my eye and scalp, and it improves all the time. I don't use the word "cured". The measure I care about is that my illness is no longer life-limiting. My life is the fullest it has ever been. That's the measure I care about for my clients too.

Why I do this work

Recovery taught me why so few people with these illnesses fully recover — because recovery isn't only physical. Your body won't get better in the same life that made it ill. Nobody had told me that. I had to find it alone, bed-bound, with a brain that barely worked.

That's the reason this practice exists: so you don't have to figure it out alone.

I trained as a Functional Medicine Certified Health Coach (FMCHC) with the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy — the most rigorous standard in health coaching. But what I bring to the room is more than training: it's the whole map, walked personally, and hundreds of hours of walking it with others since.