Cut to two years ago. I was working as a nurse advocate for women with chronic UTIs and vaginal infections. I was having the same conversation over and over about recurring, opportunistic bacteria that weaseled their way into my patients’ urinary tracts and claimed their bodies as hostages. The pattern was always the same: painful and disruptive symptoms, a doctor’s consultation, testing to confirm the infection, antibiotics, feeling better for a couple of weeks, maybe even months, and then the symptoms returned. For some of these women, that cycle had been running for decades.
At the same time, I was in a cycle of my own, just a different version. Chronic hives on my face. A gut that reacted to nearly everything. Anxious stretches that came in a cyclical pattern, seemingly tied to my hormones. I was supposed to be the one advocating for these women, and I was just as stuck as they were, fighting a body that was supposed to help me live this life, not stop me from living it.
So I started to explore. How do we heal? Not just emotionally or metaphorically, but tangibly. How does a body turn away from being consumed and back toward repairing itself?
That question turned out to be much larger than I expected. Part of it was a genuine inner reckoning, going back into old stories and finding new ones to replace them with. But it was also, in a very unglamorous way, practical. To stop my skin from reacting, I needed new tools.
The tools I’d been handed by Western medicine were prescriptions: antibiotics and steroids. Both are genuinely useful in the right circumstances and potentially harmful in the wrong ones. Antibiotics can disrupt the microbiome, sometimes creating conditions that leave the body more vulnerable to future imbalance. Yet I was prescribed one without ever being tested for a bacterial infection. My skin wasn’t even behaving like bacterial acne. It was simply what the dermatologist I saw had been trained to reach for first.
So I had to begin exploring for myself, a reality those of you who live with chronic health concerns may know well. By then, I knew the pattern of my flares. Hot, itchy, raw bumps that would begin as a welt and build one by one into full-fledged hives. I had tried nearly every sensitive skin product on the market, and nothing touched them. Most made things worse.
So I went back to basics. What actually causes hives? A histamine response. I didn’t yet know what was triggering mine, but I could begin looking for ways to support the processes involved in regulating and clearing histamine.
This is where my love of plants became something more than beautiful home decor or a nice salad to eat. I began studying calendula, chamomile, and oatstraw, looking closely at their traditional uses and the ways their compounds interact with inflammation, histamine pathways, and tissue repair. I read about plants that could support the processes the body already uses to restore balance and mend itself.
Plants stopped being ornamental to me. They became living, relational beings.
What I found, without realizing it was what I had been looking for my whole life and professional career, was a vast library of tools built to support this process of mending. Plants that could support the body’s response to histamine. Plants traditionally used to care for digestion, inflammation, hormonal rhythms, and so much more.
And as I began cultivating a more flourishing environment inside myself, one started blooming outside, too.
You should see how different my actual garden looks compared to two years ago.
She is full, let me tell you.
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