After five years in private practice, I had my third son and decided to slow down — but I never stepped away from medicine. I worked part-time as a hospitalist and served as program director for the hospitalist program. I also spent a year building a gynecology program at a hormone therapy clinic. The job itself was hard — one of the toughest I've had — but it taught me what it actually takes to build a practice, and showed me, up close, how badly midlife women are underserved.

When I was ready to return to full OB/GYN practice, the system saw the lower volume and wanted to proctor me — as if none of that counted. So I went back to a high-volume OB hospitalist program and proved, to the system and to myself, that I could still do exactly what I'd been trained to do.

But underneath all of it, something else was simmering: the practice I actually wanted to build, one where women got more than a rushed visit — time, precision, space to actually be heard. So I stopped trying to satisfy a system that was never going to be satisfied, and I built that instead.

If any part of that sounds familiar — like you have to keep proving yourself before you're allowed to choose your own pace — that's exactly why I built this practice, and the ways I work with other physicians, to prove wrong. You get to design this. Once you start, it snowballs.

A native Texan, wife, and mom to four boys, I'm not interested in a version of success that costs you everything else. I built one where it doesn't have to.