MY JOURNEY
FROM REGISTERED NURSE
After receiving my BSN from the University of Michigan, I began my nursing career in pediatric neurosurgery at Children’s Memorial Hospital (now Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago). There, I cared for children with brain tumors, arteriovenous malformations, spina bifida, hydrocephalus, and other serious brain, spinal cord, and neurological conditions.
From there, I moved into orthopaedics and sports medicine with The Center for Orthopaedic Surgery (now Illinois Bone & Joint Institute), working exclusively with one surgeon. I was based in the Chicago office and traveled with him to additional clinic locations, where I managed his patients, coordinated surgeries, and provided pre-operative and post-operative education and support.
Within a few years, I returned to neurosurgery, this time at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where I helped lead the second Gamma Knife radiosurgery program in the country. I worked closely with neurosurgeons, physicists, and radiation oncologists, and served as the primary nurse coordinating and assisting with patient care for those undergoing noninvasive treatment for brain tumors, vascular malformations, facial pain, and other neurological conditions.
I later returned to Michigan and joined William Beaumont Hospital (now part of Corewell Health) as a Case Manager, helping patients and families navigate the transition home and coordinate the care and support they needed.
Those years gave me a deep respect for Western medicine, its precision, its science, and all it can do to treat the body. But they also showed me that even the best medical care cannot address everything a patient and family may be experiencing.
I began to understand that true healing isn’t only physical, it’s also emotional, spiritual and energetic.
TO END-OF-LIFE ENERGY HEALER
Even while building my career in Western medicine, I was quietly drawn to another side of healing. I had read Many Lives, Many Masters in high school, and it was the beginning of a new way of thinking for me. I was especially struck by the idea that healing emotional trauma could change what was happening in the body, and by the belief that the soul continues on, while the body is only a temporary part of our human experience.
Years later, while working in Chicago, I began seeking out holistic and alternative medicine for myself, seeing different practitioners and trying treatments that opened me further to my spirituality and the connection between mind, body and energy. I was also doing meaningful personal work in therapy and became immersed in the teachings of Caroline Myss, Louise Hay, Eckhart Tolle, and others who expanded the way I thought about healing.
During that time, I felt drawn to the book Hands of Light. I bought it, but for reasons I didn’t understand then, I never opened it. It sat untouched on my shelf for years. I was already immersed in energy, spirituality, and the connection between our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being, but I had not yet made the connection to using my own hands for healing.
After moving back home to Michigan from Chicago, I began experiencing anxiety and panic attacks, which eventually led me to begin receiving Reiki from a practitioner. During one of our conversations, she told me she believed I should be doing this work myself. She then recommended that I read Hands of Light. I was stunned. It was the very book I had been drawn to years earlier and had never read.
That was when everything began to connect. I finally opened it and understood energy healing in a completely different way. I started studying Reiki and began practicing what I was learning on myself and my family. Over time, I completed advanced Reiki attunements and developed my intuitive abilities more fully, learning to hear, see, and sense what needed attention within the body. As those abilities grew, my work evolved beyond traditional Reiki into a highly personalized approach to energy healing.
In 2009, I founded PurReiki in Metro Detroit, where I spent a decade helping people heal on physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels. But the deepest shift came through my own family.
I had the privilege of using this work to support my grandfather, my grandmother, and my mother as they transitioned. Helping them through the end of their lives changed me. What I experienced was something I hadn’t expected. Even in the midst of fear, uncertainty, and immense grief, I could sense a profound beauty and calm. I felt intuitively guided to help prepare them, both their bodies and their souls, for what came next. Each situation was different. But at the end, I felt the same peace, the same comfort, the same connection to something greater than what we can see. By then, one thing had become clear.
End-of-Life energy healing is my calling.
I came to understand the full potential of this work—both in person and from a distance—to support people during life’s final stage in a way that reaches beyond the physical.
Today, I feel incredibly grateful for this work and honored to support patients and their families with love and compassion as they move toward a peaceful and loving transition.