536
During winter break of my freshman year, I assumed I was recovering from finals. I was sleeping constantly, drinking water without relief, and moving through each day with the sense that something was not quite right. After sleeping for 18 hours, I finally stopped dismissing it as exhaustion.
I searched my symptoms online and saw diabetes among the possibilities. My mother thought I might be worrying myself unnecessarily, but she still went with me to purchase a glucose meter and lancet kit. When 536 appeared on the screen, the uncertainty ended. We went directly to the emergency room.
It was my first hospital admission since birth. I left with a chronic condition, an unfamiliar set of responsibilities, and a fundamentally different relationship to healthcare. Changing my major to Health Services Administration was one of the earliest decisions that followed.
Insurance solved one problem and exposed several others.
Within a month of my diagnosis, I was fortunate to enroll in my university’s student health plan. The timing mattered. It gave me a way to begin establishing care, obtaining medication, and learning how to manage a condition that had entered my life without warning.
It also introduced a distinction I had never needed to make before: having insurance was not the same as having equal access to care. Coverage could exist on paper while deductibles, coinsurance, network limitations, formularies, and other benefit rules still determined what was affordable, available, or realistic. Two people could both be insured and still encounter very different possibilities.
That realization drew me toward the structure of healthcare itself. I wanted to understand how benefit design, geography, education, resources, and access to reliable information shaped what people were actually able to do after receiving a diagnosis. My years in insurance gave me a rigorous understanding of coverage and the reasoning behind many of its decisions. They also clarified that I wanted to work closer to the people living with the consequences of those decisions.
Social work became the bridge between systems and lived experience.
I knew that traditional direct patient care was not the role I was seeking, yet I wanted to work in healthcare in a way that allowed for meaningful contact with people during consequential moments. Social work offered a framework for understanding behavior, trauma, relationships, culture, environment, and the histories people bring with them into every encounter.
It also complicated my understanding of help in an important way. Good intentions do not give one person the right to direct another person’s life. Sustainable change still depends on readiness, choice, and a sense of ownership.
Sometimes the most useful work is quieter: listening closely, resisting premature conclusions, and helping someone recognize possibilities that still belong to them.
The work now moves across several rooms, but the inquiry remains consistent.
Health Services Administration taught me to see the structure of healthcare. Insurance made its rules and limitations visible. Social work brought me closer to the people navigating those systems in real time. Care management revealed how easily a clinically sound plan can unravel when transportation, housing, education, family support, community resources, or access have not been meaningfully considered.
Today, I lead care-management operations, provide therapy through The Breakthrough Space, co-own RicheMoments with my husband, and build tools in response to problems I know from the inside.
The context changes, but the questions do not. Where is the friction? What keeps reproducing it? What would make the path more coherent for the person expected to move through it?