From the ICU to the C-suite.
I became a nurse because I wanted to be in the room where life and death decisions happen. For a decade in the ICU, I was. I watched people fight to stay alive — and I watched others stop fighting. What I noticed, over and over, was that the patients who struggled most weren't always the sickest. They were the ones who had spent years at war with themselves.
I watched overfunctioners — the ones who gave everything to everyone until they had nothing left. Their bodies kept the score of every sacrifice, every swallowed truth, every time they said yes when they meant no.
"I didn't leave the bedside. I just followed my patients to where the real damage was being done — long before they needed the ICU."
When I transitioned into healthcare informatics, I brought the ICU lens with me. I moved into the world of Oracle Cerner and Epic EHR implementations — leading clinical workflow design across 78+ hospital deployments at Tenet Healthcare. I sat in boardrooms. I consulted with C-suites. I trained clinicians. And everywhere I went, I saw the same pattern: high-functioning people quietly coming apart at the seams.
The work shifted. ICU-1111 was born. And eventually, so was the book — and the PAST Framework that now sits at the center of everything I do.
