A CPA’s First Blog Post

Throughout my life I have found myself telling people, “I’m not the creative type, I’m a numbers person”. Later on, it became, “I’m not creative, I’m a CPA.” I haven’t thought of myself as someone creative enough to do a lot of things, including starting a blog. Fear and the ease of staying in my comfort zone have all driven this thought process. 

However, over the past 2 years, I have endured some really difficult life challenges. I have learned a lot about myself, and felt inspired over and over to share my health and healing journey on a more public platform. 

From a young age, I spent a lot of time in doctors’ offices seeing many different specialists. I always thought this would be my life. A revolving door of doctors, shelling out a lot of money for appointments and medications, all while never really feeling my best. In fact, until late 2021, I did not know what feeling my best truly felt like. I finally got a taste of true health after always searching for the medication or the doctor that was going to be the one who helped me. For a long time that was the work – putting in time in waiting rooms, finding the best doctor who would run the leading test to find the best medication. I hoped to find a medication that could suppress my symptoms enough to get on with my life. All of this while hoping insurance would pay for it.

Well, there came a point when insurance stopped paying for it. The medication I had taken for a decade skyrocketed to costing me $500+ each month. It was so bad that when my husband picked up the medication at the pharmacy for me, the pharmacist would make him call me to verify this was correct before allowing him to pay. I became tired. Tired of the side-effects. Tired of the financial strain. And extremely tired of the fact that my condition was getting worse despite doing exactly what my doctors were telling me to.

I have read self-help books and tried many different therapies. I overhauled just about everything I could in my lifestyle to better align with achieving my health goals. Those closest to me know that to say 2022 was a struggle is the understatement of the century.

I dove head first into finding my key to health and this is what I found. Health is not in the time you spend in a waiting room. Health is not the money you spend on a co-pay or having a world-renowned doctor. It is not in the bottom of a pill bottle, or based on having the best insurance. It is not even solely in diet and exercise. If it was, we would see our chronic disease rates declining and our life expectancies growing. Health is already in us; it just needs to be fostered.

While I did spend quite a bit of money on biohacking treatments to get out of a diseased state, some of the best healing modalities are free (or significantly less expensive than the alternative) and very simple. While healing is simple, it is not linear, and it is certainly not easy. Health is also not a destination; it is a lifelong journey. I come back to these simple principles daily as I continue to heal mentally and physically.

I’ve mostly felt inspired to share my story now that I can look back on one of the darkest periods of my life and see it as a blessing and a redo of sorts. I’m living my life with health and vitality and no longer a grim diagnosis. Penny Health is born from these principles – the ones that are free (or mostly free) and simple. Sure, I plan to share how I dug myself out my dark hole, and that certainly was not always free. However, being in a chronically diseased state was not free either. It feels good to now live my life and not have symptoms that control it.

My own lived experience has challenged virtually all of my values and principles. I am not the person I was even just two years ago, but for that I am thankful. What I plan to share each week will probably challenge some of your beliefs as well. I hope you’ll keep an open mind and join me on my journey to share a real, unfiltered, and ongoing story of healing. 

Cheers to the start of something new, to the beginning of Penny Health!

Check out how I found this path in the first place in my next post, How the Healing Found Us.