Let me take you back to the beginning...

I was four months pregnant when I opened an email informing me that I had been fired from my job as a dental hygienist in corporate dentistry.

Very cute. Very legal-department-core.

For context, the reason I was fired involved nitrous oxide.

A dentist I worked with was actively using nitrous oxide and asked me to step out of the office while it was being used. Pregnant women are generally advised to avoid occupational exposure to nitrous oxide, particularly when proper scavenging isn't assured. Yes, dental offices have ventilation and scavenging systems designed to minimize exposure. The dentist still wanted to be cautious.

Apparently, HR had other ideas.

Despite the dentist supporting what happened, despite having a medical note from my doctor, and despite what I considered to be a very reasonable pregnancy accommodation, I was terminated.

So, I sued them.

And I won.

On my son’s first birthday.

We'll save that story for another day because it deserves its own post. But I will leave you with one piece of advice:

Document. Everything.

If you have an important phone conversation, follow it up with an email: “Just confirming our conversation today…”

Save the texts. Save the emails. Take screenshots. Keep the paperwork.

Your future lawyer may thank you.

Anyway.

Getting fired at four months pregnant completely destroyed the maternity-leave plan I thought I had.

So I started temping as a dental hygienist.

And plot twist: I loved it.

I chose the days I wanted to work. I set my own availability. I negotiated my own rate. And somehow I was making significantly more than I had been making at the company that fired me.

Funny how life works.

I worked until the very end of my pregnancy and saved as much money as I possibly could. I didn't really have anything I wanted to spend it on, so I threw it into a high-yield savings account and basically forgot it existed.

I had no idea how important that money would eventually become.

The Part Nobody Really Saw

Pregnancy was hard for me.

Much harder than most people around me knew.

I didn't have much of a support system outside of one friend. I cried almost every day. I developed gestational diabetes and was injecting insulin four to six times a day, on top of what felt like an endless number of fingersticks.

My life became numbers.

Blood sugar.

Carbs.

Insulin.

Appointments.

Work.

Repeat.

I wasn't thinking about “enjoying the journey.”

I was surviving it.

I was doing whatever I needed to do to get myself and my baby safely to the other side.

One day I'll write about that period in more detail, because there's a lot more to that story.

But here's the strange part.

Despite pregnancy being one of the hardest periods of my life, it was also the most beautiful I had ever felt.

My body was creating an entire human being.

From me.

Bones, organs, fingers, eyelashes, a heartbeat.

Excuse me???

Women are incredible.

And then I gave birth.

And Postpartum Hit Me Like a Boulder.

If pregnancy was survival mode, postpartum was something else entirely.

I felt like I was fighting every day just to find a reason to keep going.

It was lonely.

Painfully lonely.

And if it weren't for my beautiful little boy, there were days when I didn't want to wake up.

He was my reason.

Every single day, I got up because he needed me.

The problem was that somewhere along the way, I stopped needing me.

I cared about him.

I didn't care about myself.

I didn't care what I ate. I didn't care what I looked like. I didn't care what happened to my body. Some days were better than others, but a lot of days were spent wondering how my life had somehow become so small.

I loved my son more than anything in this world.

I just didn't recognize the woman raising him.

Then Came the Money Part.

I had to become a stay-at-home mom.

And if you live in New York, you already know how this story goes.

Either both parents work so you can hand an alarming percentage of one person's paycheck directly to daycare...

Or one person works their ass off while the other stays home.

My husband works for the city, so his schedule wasn't exactly flexible. I stayed home.

During postpartum, I relied on government assistance for as long as I qualified. Eventually, I started picking up temporary hygiene shifts again whenever my husband could stay home with the baby.

It wasn't ideal, but it gave me something I desperately needed:

my own money again.

Then our son got RSV.

And it didn't just come and go.

It lasted about a month.

So back home I went.

I spent roughly two months completely financially dependent on my husband.

And if there's one thing you should probably learn about me early in this blog, it's this:

I hate depending on anyone.

Especially financially.

Especially on a man.

Love you, babe.

It's not personal.

It's a personality defect.

Then One Morning, My Body Finally Got My Attention.

I was about three months postpartum when I woke up and just felt...

disgusting.

Not “ugh, I need a shower” disgusting.

I mean deeply uncomfortable inside my own body.

I got up to grab my baby and suddenly became dizzy.

I had to catch myself.

And standing there, I remember thinking:

Okay. Something is actually wrong.

I had spent months ignoring myself because there was always something more important.

The baby needed something.

The house needed something.

Someone needed something.

But that morning scared me enough to finally make a doctor's appointment.

And the results were basically my body's version of an emergency staff meeting.

Blood pressure: 150/100.

A1C: 9.5.

High cholesterol.

Elevated liver enzymes.

Obesity.

I was around 220 pounds at 5'3".

And, because apparently we needed a cherry on top, depression.

Love that for me.

Sitting in that doctor's office, something finally clicked.

I had spent so much time worrying about whether my son was healthy, happy, fed, safe, growing and thriving that I had completely ignored one pretty important part of the equation:

His mother.

How was I supposed to give him the life I wanted for him if I was destroying myself in the process?

So I told my doctor:

“Just put me on Zepbound. I'm ready.”

I was finally ready to take care of myself.

She didn't argue.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that prescription was sent before I even made it back to my car.

For the first time in a long time, I felt hopeful.

And then CVS called.

“Your insurance doesn't cover this medication.”

Of course it doesn't.

I called my insurance company.

They told me they didn't cover Zepbound or Mounjaro, but that I might qualify for Ozempic.

Fine.

Whatever.

At that point, I wasn't married to a brand name.

I wasn't looking for a shortcut.

I was sick.

I met the medical criteria.

I wanted help.

So we tried.

Denied.

I appealed.

Denied.

I asked questions.

I researched.

I tried to understand what else they could possibly need from me.

Nothing changed.

And somewhere between frustration, desperation and a truly concerning number of browser tabs, I started searching for other options.

And That's When I Found the Rabbit Hole.

Every night after my baby went to sleep...

Every nap...

Every tiny pocket of quiet I could find...

I researched.

One search led to another.

One forum led to another.

One term I'd never heard before led to seventeen more terms I'd never heard before.

And eventually, I stumbled into a corner of the internet I didn't even know existed.

Peptides.

Suddenly I was reading conversations between people from completely different backgrounds who somehow had stories that sounded a lot like mine.

People frustrated with the traditional system.

People researching compounds I had never heard of.

People comparing testing.

People talking about purity.

People discussing reconstitution, storage, amino-acid sequences and lab reports like this was completely normal dinner conversation.

And everywhere I looked was the same disclaimer:

For Research Use Only. Not for human consumption.

Meanwhile, the communities discussing these products had an entirely different unofficial slogan:

Once you go gray, you'll never go back.

I didn't know whether these people were brilliant or completely insane.

Possibly both.

So I kept reading.

For hours.

Then days.

Then weeks.

I went so far down the rabbit hole that eventually the terminology that had looked like another language started making sense.

I researched what people were doing, what could go wrong, what testing meant, what bacteriostatic water was, how people were calculating things, and why everyone seemed to own an unreasonable number of tiny glass vials.

And then one day...

I did it.

I bought the essentials.

I bought bacteriostatic water.

And I bought my first 10 mg vial of “T.”

The package arrived.

I stared at that tiny vial knowing I had spent weeks reading about this moment.

That night, I made dinner.

High protein, obviously, because the internet had collectively informed me that protein was now apparently my entire personality.

I had no doctor walking me through it.

No insurance company helping me.

No beautifully printed instruction manual.

Just me, everything I had spent weeks researching, and one tiny vial sitting in front of me.

I prepared everything.

I sat there for a second.

And then I took my first shot.

I had absolutely no idea that this tiny vial was about to change the trajectory of my entire life.

But that's a story for the next post.