My Story

I’m a healthcare provider, and I still felt invisible

The paper crinkled every time I shifted my weight. The lights were too bright. The smell was that particular kind of sterile that strips warmth from a room before you even sit down. It had only been a few weeks since the birth of our daughter,  a birth that went from two centimeters to ten in thirty harrowing minutes, my screams filling the delivery room as I gripped my husband's hand and felt my calm dissolve into something I didn't recognize. Three pushes, and she was here. Safe. Healthy. And then my blood pressure started climbing again, and the joy I'd barely had time to hold was already being edged out by fear.

Now I was in a cardiologist's office, the numbers still refusing to cooperate after weeks of maximum medication doses, and she was shaking her head at my chart. She proposed switching me to a medication that wasn't safe for breastfeeding. "Breastfeeding is important to me," I said. "Yes," she said, "but we need to control these numbers."

The irony isn’t lost on me. Here I am, a pharmacist who knows medication safety, understands the guidelines and exactly what was being proposed and why. And still sitting there, listening to my concern be briefly acknowledged and then dismissed in the same breath. I immediately retreated and lost my voice, my confidence. I felt myself reduced to a set of results. Not a mother. Not a clinician. Not a person. Just a number that needed to be addressed. 

I made it to my car. Slammed the door with my frustration and sat there with the air conditioning blasting against my face while the tears flowed. I looked at myself in the visor mirror: defeated, scared, ashamed of feelings I couldn't fully name. Just then my husband called. His face lit up the screen alongside our children's, and something in me steadied and became calm. I heard a voice within me saying: something has to change and you can do it. Not just my blood pressure. Not just my medication. The way I was moving through this system, through this part of life, it had to be different. I was going to make it different.

What happened in that exam room wasn't necessarily the result of a careless provider. It was the predictable outcome of a healthcare model that is not designed to hold complexity or to see the whole person. Our healthcare systems works in silos, while our body does not. In many cases, we are herded from one specialty to the next without communication, accountability, or results. 

The standard outpatient visit runs fifteen minutes. In that window, a provider is expected to review history, address the presenting concern, update medications, complete documentation, and move to the next patient. There is no structural space for much else, therefore it simply does not occur. Informed consent, as most women experience it, is a legal checkbox, a form signed, a risk recited. What it rarely is, in practice, is a real conversation. The kind where you understand not just what is being recommended, but why, and what happens if you choose differently, and what questions you're allowed to ask. That gap between consent as a right and consent as an experience  is where so many women quietly disappear.

There's also something else no one talks about in these appointments, the connection of mind and body. When we feel dismissed, unheard, or rushed, our bodies register it as a threat. The fight-or-flight response activates. Cortisol rises. The part of the brain responsible for complex reasoning and confident self-expression shuts down. I am the perfect example. This is not weakness. This is biology. And it means that the moments when we need to advocate for ourselves, maybe when the stakes are highest, when the decision is most consequential - well unfortunately these are precisely the moments our nervous system may be least equipped to do it. The system, as it exists, does not account for this. My realization of this is what made me decide to help mama AND her support network to be her own best advocate in the exact conditions that make advocacy nearly impossible. 

That night, still raw, I started researching. I found functional medicine - a root-cause framework with a focus on the whole person, its insistence on asking why before defaulting to what. I immersed myself. As I began to apply these theories, something remarkable happened, my blood pressure began to normalize. Not just from a bandaid, but through understanding my own body in a way I had never been given the space to do. The transformation was so profound that I couldn't keep it to myself. I felt a calling to bridge the gap I had lived through, to translate what I'd learned into something that could reach other women before they found themselves crying in a parking lot wondering if they were failing at their own health or as a mother. 

You don't need to already know the right questions, or the clinical terminology, or where to look for answers. But you may want to learn, as it can help prepare you for one of life’s biggest stress tests, pregnancy. I believe you deserve someone in your corner who can provide you this information and support and who believes that you deserve more than a prescription and a follow-up date for any concern you bring to your provider. 

You deserve answers that explain why. Not just what your numbers mean, but what's driving them, what your options actually are, and what it means to choose one path over another. You deserve appointments that don't make you feel rushed or like an interruption. You deserve to say this matters to me without watching your concern get folded into the next agenda item.

Mothers deserve to be nurtured, just as they are expected to nurture their babies.  A mother’s body goes through something so profound, and it deserves care that meets that reality. If no one has told you that yet,  I'm telling you now. You are allowed to ask for more. You are allowed to take up space in your own healthcare. You are not failing for not knowing how. You just haven't had the right support. 

If any part of this resonates,  you're in the right place. And I am so glad you are here.

The Empowered Mother series is my program built entirely around teaching women how to do exactly this: understand their own health, know what to ask for,  advocate inside clinical settings, and step into maternal care with clarity and confidence instead of confusion.

The waitlist is open. I'd love for you to be part of it.

→ [Join the waitlist here] 

Sofia-Marie Etzel, PharmD, CFMP, is the founder of Mom2Moms Apothecary, LLC -  supporting women through preconception, pregnancy, and postpartum with functional medicine, nervous system healing, and fierce self-advocacy.