This is my story.

I grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Small steel town, known mostly for floods. My dad ran a crane at Bethlehem Steel and my mom stayed home. I was an only child. I think people sometimes assumed that meant my parents did everything for me and I would not know how to do much on my own.

I spent a lot of my childhood following my dad around while he fixed things. I will always be Daddy’s little girl. My mom used to tell me, ‘You are just like him,’ and I took that as a badge of honor.

But I was watching her too. My mom was there for much more of my life, and her influence was quieter but no less real. I watched her cook. Later, when I was away at school, I would call and ask how long to cook the chicken or how she made something. Somewhere along the way, I became a pretty good cook myself.

I wish I had spent more time learning beside both of them while I had the chance. What I did learn was how to watch closely. Being an only child, I did not always feel like I fit in. I could be the wallflower in the room, noticing what people did and how they did it.

That attention followed me into physical therapy. I watch how someone moves because the details matter. I want a patient to understand why we are doing something, what doing it well should feel like, and how it connects to the life they want back. I would rather help someone build the right pattern from the beginning than send them away with a list they do not understand.

I still fix my own things. That has not changed.

I lost my dad the day I came home from my first semester of physical therapy school. December of 1995. I finished the degree, and then I spent a long time being the person everyone else could count on.

My dad taught me how to fix things, figure things out, and keep going. I carried that into the rest of my life. When something needed to be handled, I handled it. When my mom needed help, I was usually the one who tried to fix it for her.

That independence has served me well. It has also made it easy to believe I should do everything myself and hard to ask for help.

I am single right now, but I still believe I will find the right person. I am not looking for someone who has to do everything I do. I want someone who complements me, helps me where I need it, and wants to love and enjoy this life together. I pray for that.

At thirty-nine I had a hysterectomy. They kept my ovaries, so on paper I did not qualify for hormone treatment. I started getting hot flashes at forty anyway. Waking up soaked, changing clothes at two in the morning, running hot all the time. Nobody had prepared me for any of it, and when I asked, I was told I was too young for it to be what I thought it was.

So I started trying to understand it. For about fifteen years, I learned mostly on my own. The sleep, the heat, the fog, the energy, all of it.

And the whole time, I was watching the same thing happen to the women I treated. They would come in for one thing, a shoulder that stopped working with no injury, joint pain with nothing torn, and when we talked, it was never just the one thing. It was the sleep. The heat. The fog. The mood. The energy. The same list, woman after woman, year after year.

That is what an hour at a time with thousands of women can teach you. A shoulder problem, broken sleep, mood changes, and low energy may not be separate stories. Hormonal change can be one of the threads connecting them.

Once you begin seeing those connections, you ask better questions and stop assuming every symptom belongs in a separate box.

I want to travel. I want to ride my motorcycle. I want to stay strong enough to keep doing the things that make life feel like mine.

That is what I do now.