This October marks Breast Cancer Awareness Month. This year, it means something different to me than it ever has before. Last week, I marked five years cancer-free. Stage 3, chemo, radiation, three surgeries, more chemo, and months of physical therapy brought me back. Five years later, I’m on a completely different path than the one I was on before. Cancer didn’t just interrupt my career — it ended one chapter and opened another. I couldn’t go back to 30+ years of chairside hygiene the way it was. So I built something new: personalized myofunctional therapy services that reflect everything I learned about being cared for during my own treatment.
I’ve told pieces of this story before, but there’s one part I haven’t talked about much: what it felt like to actually be seen during treatment. Not managed. Not rushed through. Seen.
Being Seen at Memorial Sloan Kettering
The team at Memorial Sloan Kettering took the time to listen — to my questions, my fears, the parts of my life outside the diagnosis that still mattered to me. I never once felt like a number on a chart. I felt like a whole person. That mattered more than I can put into words, especially during my most vulnerable moments.
I wish I could say that’s the standard experience. It isn’t. A national survey from Gallup and Pivotal Ventures found that a third of women struggle to get a doctor to take their symptoms seriously. 42% say they’ve had to advocate hard for their own health, compared to 26% of men. More than half of women reported at least one negative healthcare encounter.
Those aren’t just uncomfortable statistics to me. They’re the exact experience so many of my own clients describe before they ever find their way to me. I hear it constantly: a doctor says their snoring or sleep apnea “isn’t that bad” and doesn’t need treatment. Or they’re told to just lose weight, or just stop sleeping on their back. Doctors write off their exhaustion as stress. They write off their jaw pain as tension. Dismissed, again and again, until they stop bringing it up at all.
Being heard isn’t just a nice feeling, either. A 2025 study in BMC Health Services Research on cancer patients found that when people feel genuinely heard by their care team, it builds trust — and that trust measurably improves their outcomes and quality of life. Feeling dismissed doesn’t just feel bad. It gets in the way of getting better.
What Personalized Myofunctional Therapy Looks Like in My Practice
That’s the standard I hold myself to with every client now. When someone comes to me exhausted, mouth-breathing, waking with a sore jaw, or told for years that it’s “just” something — I don’t rush past it. I ask questions and listen for the whole picture, not just the symptom in front of me. I build a plan around the person, not a protocol.
It’s not a technique I learned in a course. It’s something I lived, at the most vulnerable point of my life. And it’s the reason I built my practice around personalized myofunctional therapy.
Five years cancer-free. Endless gratitude for the team at MSK and for everyone who held me up along the way. And if you’re reading this because you’ve been dismissed, brushed off, or told it’s “just” something — I see you, I’m listening, and that’s exactly the kind of care I want to give you.
If this sounds like you — then I’m your person.
Take a look at my personalized myofunctional therapy services, or go ahead and schedule a complimentary assessment so we can talk about what you’re experiencing.
