Why I Nearly Died — And What It Taught Me About Healing

In March 2020 a prescription blood thinner almost killed me. And nobody warned me it could.

By the time I was admitted to the emergency room I had lost well over fifty percent of my blood. I was slipping deeper into a health crisis with every hour that passed.

The bleeding stopped on the second night. I believe to this day that was not medicine. That was God.

A full year later a holistic nurse in Ottawa told me the truth. The blood thinner I had been prescribed had no antidote. Not organically. Not pharmaceutically. If the bleeding had continued there was nothing medicine could do to stop it.

I sat with that for a long time.

The conversation that changed everything

The nurse was direct. She did not soften it. She said the medication I had been given was prescribed appropriately by the standards of conventional care. The risk was known. The antidote gap was known. And it was not disclosed to me.

Not because my physician was negligent. But because within the conventional clinical model, the risk-benefit calculation had been made on my behalf — and the conversation about alternatives, about cellular support, about what the body actually needs to maintain vascular integrity — that conversation was never part of the protocol.

She asked me a question I have never forgotten.

"What actually supports the body's ability to recover at the cellular level? Not manage symptoms. Not intervene after the fact. Actually recover."

I did not have an answer. I had spent my career in business, not medicine. But I knew enough to know that the question mattered.

Eight blue bottles

A friend sent me eight blue bottles. I did not know what they were. I was skeptical in the way that anyone trained to trust institutional authority is skeptical of anything outside it.

Within five days I felt something shift that I had not felt in longer than I could remember.

I am careful about how I describe that. I am not a clinician. I do not make clinical claims. But I know what I felt. And I know that it sent me on a search I have not stopped since.

Four years of research

That moment led to four years of research into why we resist the very modalities that could help us most. Why the system pushes back. Why patients are left navigating alone in the 29 days between appointments with no clinical support and no between-visit protocol.

I interviewed practitioners. I read the peer-reviewed literature. I spoke with patients who had navigated chronic conditions for years — some successfully, many not. I tried to understand the gap between what the science supports and what the clinical model delivers.

That research became my book. *The Healing Divide — Why We Resist Natural and Alternative Healing Modalities.*

And it became the foundation of the work I do today alongside integrative, functional, naturopathic, chiropractic, and hands-on practitioners who know that sick care is not health care.

What I learned

The body has an extraordinary capacity to recover. Not manage. Not compensate. Actually recover — at the cellular level, through mechanisms that conventional medicine has been slow to fund and study but that the science increasingly supports.

The gap between what we know and what we do is not a knowledge gap. It is a structural gap. A support gap. A conversation gap.

I nearly died learning that lesson.

Four years of research confirmed it.

And now I spend my time working with the practitioners who are already doing the right thing — and helping them build the support structures their patients need in the 29 days between visits.

That is the work. And it started with a blood thinner and a holistic nurse in Ottawa who told me the truth.