Ask for an Answer - My Health Journey

Over the past two years, my body has become both the setting and the storyline of my life. What started with a knee replacement in April 2024 has unfolded into a cascade of diagnoses and treatments: chronic lymphocytic leukemia, an enlarged prostate that doctors feared was cancer, and now a full hip replacement scheduled for February 2026.

Layer on the countless hours of physical therapy, massage, acupuncture, and therapy sessions, and my days sometimes feel less like a life and more like a full-time job of managing what hurts. I’ve built a “team” most CEOs would envy: an oncologist, urologist, orthopedic surgeon, GP, nutritionist, functional medicine doctor, and mental health therapist. It’s a web of care that should give me comfort—and often does—but it also leaves me exhausted.

Because here’s the truth:

I’m tired.
Tired of pain. Tired of vulnerability. Tired of waking up anxious and wondering, what’s next?

And yet, I know I’m not the only one. I know there are people whose medical journeys are harder, scarier, more relentless. That awareness brings perspective, but it doesn’t erase the weight of what I carry.

What I long for most is stability. A little calm. A stretch of days where my body isn’t the loudest voice in the room. But life hasn’t handed me that just yet.

Asking for an Answer

This is where my philosophy—Ask for an Answer—meets its hardest test. In leadership, I talk about how it’s not about pretending to have all the solutions, but being brave enough to ask the real questions. In life, it’s no different.

So I keep asking:
What am I supposed to learn from this season?
Is the answer resilience? Surrender? Humility? Maybe it’s patience—something I’ve never been particularly good at. Or maybe it’s finally turning the compassion I offer so easily to others inward, to myself.

Some days, no answer comes. Other days, the answer is simply, keep going. Show up for the appointment. Take the pill. Let the tears come. Trust that asking the question, even without an immediate reply, is its own kind of progress.

Leadership in the Mess

Here’s where my personal life and professional life collide: how do you lead when you feel broken? When you’re physically depleted but others are still looking to you for clarity, courage, and kindness?

I’ve learned that illness strips you down to your essentials. There’s no energy for posturing, no mask strong enough to hide what your body betrays. And in that stripping-down comes a clarity: leadership isn’t about having the perfect plan or radiating invulnerability. It’s about showing up, honestly, with whatever you’ve got left—and inviting others to do the same.

I used to think resilience meant powering through. Smile on, shoulders back, don’t let them see you sweat. But resilience, I’ve discovered, is far quieter. It’s letting yourself cry when you need to. It’s sending the calendar reschedule when your body demands rest. It’s acknowledging fear without letting it define you. That honesty builds more trust than any facade of toughness ever could.

Lessons From the Waiting Room

If you spend enough time in waiting rooms, you start to see the quiet solidarity of people navigating their own battles. The nod of recognition when you lock eyes with someone else clutching their paperwork. The way strangers strike up conversations about grandkids or vacations, weaving small moments of humanity into sterile spaces.

It reminds me of something I tell leaders all the time: everyone is carrying something you can’t see. My diagnoses happen to be visible on a chart, but pain and vulnerability are universal. The gift—if there is one in all this—is a renewed empathy. I know more deeply now what it means to feel fragile, and I carry that awareness into every coaching session, every boardroom, every conversation.

Living the Questions

Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” That line has echoed in me often these days.

My instinct is to chase answers, to pin down certainty. But the truth is, most of the time, we’re all just living the questions. The answers reveal themselves slowly—sometimes only in hindsight, sometimes never at all.

So I return to my principle: Ask for an Answer. Even if the answer is silence, even if the only reply is my own breath in the middle of a restless night, the act of asking keeps me engaged, awake, alive.

Still Here

I won’t pretend this journey is noble or inspiring every day. Most days it’s messy, frustrating, and frightening. But it’s real. And maybe that’s the only answer I can hold onto right now: the honesty of saying out loud that I am tired, I am scared, and I am still here.

And, I still have so much I want to do!! And I am blessed with a loving and supportive husband, who happens to be a doctor and can assist me in so many ways.

I am excited about 2026 and beyond and how I can help others and impact our community. I did not write this edition for sympathy. I simply wanted to get my feelings out on paper.

And maybe, for now, that’s enough.