Hello there, thank you for checking out our website.
In order for you to know if I would be a good fit, I wanted to share a little bit of my story.
I was born and raised in Regina. I have family ties to multiple rural Saskatchewan towns which has always been important to me. I thought I always wanted to be a teacher and got my education degree at the University of Regina, however, once I entered the field, I found that although I was good at my job as an arts education and core French teacher, most days were an uphill battle. Being a teacher is very challenging, and though I loved my students, colleagues, and the communities I worked in, it just was not sustainable for me, especially once I became a parent.
In 2016, I experienced a life-changing medical event. I had complications from a routine knee scope and ended up with blood clots in my lungs which became life-threatening. I spent many days in the hospital, with a team of highly trained doctors and nurses watching over me. When things were supposedly getting better, I got worse. I had a cardiac arrest and was put into a medically induced coma for about 24 hours to try to stop the damage. I was not expected to survive.
At this point, I had been married for two years to my high school sweetheart, who had to just wait and hope that I’d make it through the night. Thanks to the amazing medical staff and one special doctor, who is now the namesake of my son, I survived and began the long road to recovery.
I was off work for eight months, during which time I had to relearn how to walk (don’t forget I had knee surgery before this whole mess!), get multiple tests and ultrasounds to see how my heart was doing, not to mention enter therapy for the intense medical trauma I had just experienced. I found that going from being a relatively healthy 26-year-old to being a very deathly ill 26 year old was extremely isolating. I learned in therapy how to work with those feelings and turn what was a very scary experience into a gift of time to return to things I’d not let myself do as I became a “working adult” as a part of my recovery. I was then that I really began to understand what self-care was. If I overloaded myself with tasks and visits, my body would let me know very quickly. My baselines had been moved way lower than I was used to. I had to move slow, be intentional. The small victories in my day became my focus. Minute progress was the name of my recovery game. Eventually, I became stronger, and then slowly became stronger than I was before I entered the hospital. My time in therapy was focused around recovering from the mental strain I’d endured, not only from my own experiences and memories of what happened, but also my family’s and my husband’s trauma reactions. It was a lot.
Fast-forward a few years and my heart and body have made a full recovery. I was privileged to
have some wonderful people in my corner guiding me along the way. I slowly went back to work and began making my dream a reality to one day be a counsellor and work with people who, like me, had been knocked down in life due to whatever circumstances (you definitely do not need a near death experience to have been knocked down! This could be anything: a divorce, losing a job, losing a friendship, dealing with a different illness).
After all these years (it has been six years which is hard to believe), there are parts of these experience that I have carried with me and have resurfaced during certain times (like giving birth to my two kids). I have had to revisit therapy for what I call a “tune-up” more than once. I have had to work hard and be intentional about my recovery, and moving forward in my life, not being
stuck in my trauma. One of my therapists called this “making my ghosts into ancestors,” and I think of this often.
Honouring my experience and not letting it keep me in the past. This is where Cultivate Wellness began. My recovery and life since then did not just happen by chance, it was cultivated. I cultivated it.
If you feel like you’ve been knocked down and are struggling to get back up, know this takes a long time and is not a direct path. The process of “getting back up” is ongoing. For me it requires vulnerability, being intentional, and a great deal of courage (and many hard days). Healing is not linear.
Reach out, send me a message. I’d love to connect with you.
