CEO and patient, same person.
I came home to the family business — and found my life's work.
My parents founded Desert Harvest in 1993, for my aunt. She had interstitial cystitis, and at the time, there were almost no answers for women with IC. They built the first product for her, out of our family kitchen. I was there at the start.
I took a long way around before stepping into the company. I studied leadership and organizational management at the University of Denver, then spent years in the entertainment industry — managing venues and coordinating global events for musicians most people have on a playlist somewhere. It was loud, mobile, and full of people. It taught me how to run complicated things calmly.
In 2012, my parents retired, and I became CEO. I was second-generation by blood long before I was second-generation by title. Under my leadership the company has grown by more than 1,500%, and we've served over 100,000 women — with pelvic, sexual, urological, and menopausal care, and with the radiation-oncology support that sits quietly alongside all of that.
The part I didn't plan for
In 2016, I was diagnosed with interstitial cystitis and endometriosis. The very conditions Desert Harvest was founded for. I had been working in pelvic and sexual health for more than two decades by then, and suddenly it was personal in a way it hadn't been before. I wasn't building products for someone else. I was a patient.
What I learned, sitting on both sides of the formulation table, is that women's bodies are far more interconnected than the specialty silos suggest. Pelvic health doesn't end where hormonal health begins. They share a nervous system, a vascular bed, an immune system, and — eventually — a menopause.
Menopause is a complete rearrangement of the internal thyroid system. It's quite literally puberty in reverse.
— Authority Magazine, December 2024
That's where "CEO and patient, same person" comes from. It's not a line I rehearse. It's just the truth of how I show up.
At 41, another piece
At 41, I was diagnosed with autism. I'd spent a lifetime building workarounds for things I thought everyone found hard. I'd gotten very, very good at masking. The diagnosis didn't change my work — it explained it. It explained why I could run global event logistics for years but struggle with a small dinner party. Why I could give a keynote and not know what to say in the elevator after.
I talk about it now, carefully. Not because it's the headline — it isn't. Because other women who were diagnosed late, or who haven't been diagnosed yet, read this kind of thing. And it helped me to find other women writing about it. I'd like to return the favour.
Family
I live with my husband, our three sons, and three dogs. The dogs have more seniority than anyone cares to admit.
Now
I'm in my third decade at Desert Harvest and my fourteenth year as CEO. I write a monthly column for BELLA called Dear Sexpert. I sit on BELLA's Medical Advisory Board, and on the board of the Northern Light Health Center for Healthy Brain Aging. I'm a supporter of AANE, the late-diagnosed autistic women's network. And I'm here — quietly, over time, in these pages — writing about the work I've given my life to.
In September 2025, thirty-two years after my parents made the first product on a kitchen table for my aunt, we shipped effera™ — the first human-identical lactoferrin formulated for menopause. I think about that arc a lot. The mission hasn't moved an inch; the science around it has finally caught up. "Women deserve science-backed solutions that reflect the complexity of their bodies. With effera™, we are introducing a human-specific immune protein that works in harmony with our patented aloe." It's still the same answer to the same question my parents were asking in 1993 — what would actually help her? — only now we can ask it with better tools, for more women, at a stage of life that has been under-served for far too long.
If you're here because you share one of my diagnoses, or because you love someone who does: hello. You're in the right place.