Are You Okay? START HERE 👋
Let’s get to know each other! Tell me about YOU!
As our community grows, I’d love to get to know you better! This post is intended to help connect and get to know one another. Please join me in the comments!
I am thrilled that you’ve joined the Are You Okay? community. In this space, we’re focused on getting YOU back in the driver’s seat of your health. Through weekly posts, podcast episodes, and regular Q&As with your questions, I’m here to help you be more okay tomorrow than you are today.
Here’s what this space IS:
A community of people seeking evidence-based, straight talk about health.
A safe place where I answer your questions and provide practice health advice and guidance.
A home for collaboration and growth, where we learn and support one another.
Here’s what this space is NOT:
A substitute for personalized medical advice. While I’d love to provide specific medical advice that changes your life, the truth is, I can only do that for my own patients whose unique health issues and circumstances I know well. My aim here isn’t to be prescriptive but rather to provide a framework to help you become the CEO of your health.
A place of judgment. Every piece of information and guidance I provide is rooted in medical evidence, my own experience, and a genuine desire to help whomever I can. So please join me for a shared sense of humor and humility!
👉 Tell me about you!
Before we dive into the content here, tell me about you! I’d love to know:
who you are
where you’re from
what is top of mind for you when it comes to your own health.
Want to know more about me? Click here to read the About page.
Last, here are some of the most popular posts around here for you to start with:
Hi. I am Danielle. 51 years young, labor and delivery nurse and OB clinical instructor. I have been married for 27 years to my best friend. We have 2 sons who are 22 and 20. They live at home, work and attend college.
Working as a nurse through the pandemic did a number on me. Lexapro has helped with my anxiety and depression. Also perimenopausal which comes with lots of other fun symptoms. In February I was diagnosed with obstructive sleep disorder and I started using CPAP. CPAP and my new sleep number bed have helped with a lot of the symptoms I thought were related to perimenopause. Turns out if you are not getting good oxygenation, headaches and brain fog are a ever present.
I'm all about evidence based health information. There is so much mis/dis information out there. I have to go into spaces where I know that I don't have to argue about evidence based recommendations. My patients come in refusing everything that helps us provide them and their baby with safe care. Then I have to educate them away from that TikTok influencer that has no education or credentials to be giving health information. It is exhausting!
I'm the ZEBRA, the medical enigma that every doc wants UNTIL they actually get a patient who is not afraid to call BULLSHIT on useless expensive and unnecessary treatments.
20 years post heart attack - 4 stents - I cook all of our food and run 2 miles a day on a treadmill. That's down from 5 miles a day for 16 years b/c my knees are starting to tingle.
Funny thing about the heart attack, there were 9 of us in cardiac ICU 20 years ago, and I'm the only one still alive. Fired the first two cardiologists, stayed with the third for 13 years until we moved from NC to Virginia...haven't found anyone I like yet. Everyone - cardiologists and primaries seem to think statins are the answer to whatever ails, but don't get me started on that!
Married to the same woman for 45 years, ( we still have an incredible sex life!!!) three children, the oldest is retired, middle is in Forestry, and the youngest is a doctor teaching at a local university. BTW, the youngest is a published author, with 9 books, and an expert on corsets, robots and robot sex.
Retired twice, once on a medical in 2002, the last on my desire to step off the fast past world of being an artist - now my time is taken by being a political activist and putting a spark in the world's ass as I walk through.
On being a Zebra; A true Synesthete - my taste, vision and hearing are interwired, that makes reactions to medicines unpredictable, I woke up in the OR while being stented and tried to get up from the table not once, but twice.
At 76, I'm glad to still be here and can't wait to see what the next few decades bring!