About Katalyst Health

From patient to practitioner — a personal journey of discovery

It started when I was five

My health story began when I was five years old. Mold was the first clue—but it would be far from the whole story. That year, we lost the farm and moved into a small rancher. In my memory, it was more shack than house: dark, wet, and crowded with life. Microbial communities flourished in the damp wood. Ants and mites were everywhere. When we turned on the tap, slugs would fall out. The house had an unhealthy life of its own, and we were living in the middle of it. The week we moved in, I developed asthma and incredible migraines. The asthma became so severe that I was in and out of the hospital once a week for six months, until we found somewhere else to live.

The day we moved out, the coughing stopped, and so did the migraines. Looking back, that was also when I started lining up my pencils by color and size. After that, life seemed normal, and it would be many years before I understood what my body had been telling me.

When it came back

As an adult, it started again. After moving into a new home, I developed hives on my eyelids and face, and my energy dropped. Around my menstrual cycle, my calves would swell so much that it felt like they would erupt out of my skin. The timing became another clue—one that led me to explore how hormonal shifts might be interacting with inflammatory signaling and the movement of fluid through my blood vessels and lymphatic system. Over time, I became exhausted and foggy, increasingly reactive to foods, supplements, smells and environments, and I struggled with digestive symptoms that kept being labeled “IBS.” I saw specialist after specialist. The same basic panels were repeated, and I was told my results looked normal, or that any abnormalities were too minor to explain how unwell I felt. But I knew my body was not functioning normally.

Eventually, we found the source: the AC unit running directly above my bed was full of mold. My husband cleaned it out right in front of me while I danced with joy, because I had known all along that something in the house was making me sick, and here it finally was. What we didn’t realize was how much a contaminated unit releases when it’s disturbed, or how severely my already-sensitized lungs and immune system would react, and we didn’t protect ourselves at all. That night, I became fully asthmatic again, coughing horribly, and the night terrors began: night after night, I woke up paralyzed, fully aware but unable to move, seeing dark silhouettes of people coming toward me like intruders, with an overwhelming sense of doom and no way to escape. A week later, I was due to fly to Kenya for a two-week bikepacking trip on a fully loaded bicycle. I went anyway, sleep-deprived and with inflamed lungs. Partway through, the pulse oximeter on my watch showed an oxygen saturation of 79%, and I had become profoundly hypoxic. I had to stop in a small village and rest for days before I could continue, and it took months for my lungs to recover their capacity.

Never just one thing

That was when I stopped looking at my symptoms one at a time. Over the years, I navigated multiple mold exposures, mast cell reactivity and histamine intolerance, chronic digestive dysfunction, parasitic infections, and bacterial and fungal overgrowth in my sinuses. None of it happened in isolation. Environmental exposures affected my immune system. Infections and microbial imbalance raised inflammation and lowered my tolerance to foods and supplements. Gut dysfunction affected my nutrient status, hormones and histamine handling. And as the burden grew, my nervous system became more and more sensitized, until my body was reacting to things I had once tolerated easily.

Living through all of this gave me a depth of pattern recognition that no textbook alone could provide. I know what it feels like when symptoms move between the gut, brain, hormones, skin, sinuses, lungs and nervous system, and how discouraging it is to be told that everything looks fine when you know it isn’t.

Learning how it all connects

I kept studying what was happening in my body, from a biochemical standpoint and an immune standpoint, and eventually made my way to becoming a practitioner. I still approach health the same way: piecing together what mechanism is actually happening in the body, so we can understand how to fix it.

Rebuilding

By looking beyond diagnostic labels and working through the layers underneath them — environmental exposures, infections, microbial imbalance, mast cell and immune signaling, nutrient status, hormone metabolism and nervous system regulation — I rebuilt my health and returned to an active life filled with mountain biking, hiking and ski touring.

Years later, mold found us again, this time in a brand-new home. You can read that story in Mold in a Newly Built Home: Our Story.

Today, many of the people I work with are living some version of this story, often with several of these patterns at once.

What I want you to know

Your symptoms are not imaginary, and they are not a character flaw. They are physiological signals. There is a reason your body is responding the way it is, even if no one has found it yet. I bring both the scientist’s mind and the “I’ve been there” perspective to every case, because I believe the body is always responding to something. My work is to help uncover what that is.