Still punk rock.
New subject.

I'm excited to share that my latest stint at community college is complete, and I'm on to university-level education to study Cognitive Science at the University of California, Davis. So how did a 47-year-old, brain cancer patient advocate with a background in communications, patient advocacy, and health services research come to choose this major? Excellent question.

As I transfer a terabyte of data from my OpenNotes (work) laptop to my new (school) laptop, I'm running across fragments of unpublished blog posts about my life between 2017 and 2026. Here's a post I never shared, outlining my whirlwind new life after I quit my job to join the full-time world of patient-partnered research.

After nine years of working at the intersection of patient advocacy and health services research, this is my last week with OpenNotes at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Over these nine years, my role transformed. When Cait DesRoches offered me a job, I had no idea it would be the longest job I’d ever had, or that it would lead to a vision of what I would do next.

I have a status update on the driving-front! I wrote last fall about going back to school. What I didn't say explicitly then is that I couldn't have committed to that decision without knowing I could physically get there.

I use every tool at my disposal to make sense of the messiness of living with brain cancer. I don’t recommend this approach for everyone. My hope is that models like ChatGPT Health can help regular people become more curious about their health, learn to ask informed questions, and feel more prepared for their medical visits.

As someone who has spent nearly two decades experimenting with digital health tools—personal health records, tethered portals, wearables, symptom trackers, oncology apps, research dashboards—I was excited to see what Health GPT could actually do for me.