Training
BSN from College of St. Scholastica (1999); MSN, family-nurse-practitioner track from University of Minnesota (2014). Twenty years staff on the labor and delivery floor at St. Mary's Duluth before crossing into the family-practice clinic in 2014. IUD-trained through the Reproductive Health Access Project's long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) curriculum since 2008. Implant-trained (Nexplanon, Implanon) through the manufacturer's certification program.
Member of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Holds the Menopause Society Certified Practitioner credential, recertified 2024.
What I do
I run the reproductive lane (Lane 04) and the perimenopause lane (Lane 06). Wednesday is insertion day; we do most of our IUDs and implants on Wednesdays, with paracervical block as the standard rather than as the exception. The rest of the week is contraception conversations, cycle troubleshooting, preconception visits, miscarriage care, and the longer perimenopause work — the tracker visits, the hormone therapy decisions, the sleep work, the non-hormonal options conversations.
I also run the practice's preconception curriculum, which is mostly visits and a single printed booklet I update yearly. The booklet is on bone-coloured stock, paragraph-tabbed, and free; members can take it home, give it to a friend, or annotate it with their own questions.
What I bring
I came to family practice from twenty years on the labor floor, and the labor floor teaches you a particular way of listening. The fastest a labor goes is rarely the safest. The most-used phrase in a good labor is "we have time"; the most-used phrase in a bad labor is "we don't have time," and a good labor nurse can tell you, with surprising precision, when the second phrase is about to start being true. That is what I am trying to bring to perimenopause and reproductive-care visits: a clinician's willingness to hold the long view, and to know when the long view is not available.
Availability
Member-facing hours: Monday/Wednesday/Friday 07:30–18:00, Tuesday afternoons, alternating Saturdays. Wednesdays are reserved for insertions; if you have a non-insertion visit you can usually book Wednesday morning, and if you are scheduled for an insertion that day you will typically be the only patient in the room for a 60–90-minute block.
Cross-references: most of my visits are in Lane 04 and Lane 06; my transcript is "Perimenopause as a data problem"; case log 003 is a co-managed perimenopause case.