From Critical Illness to Clinical Research

I did not come to Children’s Hospital Colorado knowing I would someday return as a researcher. I arrived first as a patient — exhausted, struggling to stay upright, unsure why my body felt like it was quietly failing me. I had been an active kid who loved biking and skiing, but by middle school my health had deteriorated to the point that getting out of bed felt impossible. I fainted often. I lived with constant pain and a fatigue so deep it hollowed out my days.

I was 14 years old when I first arrived at adolescent medicine at Children’s. It was late summer, and I knew I needed help. One of the first things my doctor questioned was my iron. Bloodwork from months earlier showed low levels that had been overlooked. When new labs came back, the results were stark. My ferritin was so low that my bone marrow stores were depleted. I needed help immediately. After my first iron infusion, I felt the fog lift. I could think clearly again. I didn’t just manage school, I thrived in it, something my doctor had promised from the very beginning.

That same diligence led my care team to diagnose me with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. POTS explained the dizziness, the fainting, and the way my heart raced simply from standing. Structured treatment and physical therapy gave me the tools to manage my symptoms. Beyond treating each individual system, my care team searched for common threads, leading to a diagnosis of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

My relationship with Children’s felt human. My doctors listened, believed me and kept searching for answers. When severe eczema spread across almost my entire body, my dermatologist quickly recognized that previous treatments were worsening my condition and started me on a medication that changed my life.

But even with answers, improvement isn’t always linear.

What started as “freshman flu” became a cycle of severe infections requiring repeated hospitalizations and IV antibiotics. At one appointment, my primary care physician immediately recognized that what I thought was a manageable skin infection had already progressed much further and sent me straight to the emergency department. I pushed back, saying I had to go work in my lab. She told me that while a few hours might matter for my experiments, those same hours could matter for my life.

She was right.

What followed were weeks of hospitalizations, rounds of antibiotics and escalating treatment  including an IV antibiotic of last resort in hopes of knocking the infection down or at least slowing its rapid escalation. With the support of my care team, my condition began to improve. What I remember most is not how sick I became, but how many people refused to let that be the end of the story.

My blood counts, which had run low and had been declining, affecting immunity and oxygen delivery, dropped even further during a period of prolonged bleeding. My body could no longer compensate, and I became acutely unstable, which led to another hospitalization. I don’t remember much from that admission, but I remember feeling weak, starved for air and cold. Somewhere in that nothingness, there was warmth around my hand. Someone was holding it. Someone stayed with me. Someone was there.

Some of the most meaningful moments of my time at the hospital did not occur in exam rooms. They happened in quieter spaces, including the T(w)een Zone, where I return as a volunteer whenever I can. During one of my toughest admissions, when I felt utterly depleted, a therapy dog named Kit refused to leave my side. She rested her head in my lap and stayed there. She seemed to understand something I had not yet put into words — that I was sicker than I was willing to admit. Her presence reminded me that care does not always come in clinical forms.

As I grew stronger, I returned to volunteering.  I spent time with kids who reminded me of my younger self, organizing art activities for patients and making art to support the hospital. During inpatient stays, I asked for markers and paper whenever I could, not just as an escape but as a way to make sense of what I was going through.

Eventually, I found myself working alongside pediatric oncologists, conducting research that felt deeply personal. Research was no longer abstract. It was tied to the same questions that had shaped my own care, the search for patterns, explanations and ways to prevent others from reaching the same points of crisis.

Now, as a premed student, my path feels inseparable from my patient experience. One of my current areas of study is how to improve survival for critically ill children with conditions such as sepsis. While recovering, I was moving between two realities: being the patient trying to stabilize and the researcher trying to understand stabilization for others.

I have worked in labs across the country, but Children’s remains my anchor. It taught me what it looks like when medicine refuses to settle for incomplete answers. It showed me that progress only matters if it reaches the people who need it. I want to be the doctor who leaves no stone unturned, because I know what it feels like when someone finally does.