A builder's eye and a patient's read on what you're building.
I take a small number of engagements a year, one at a time, where a builder's eye and lived experience can be useful to work you're already doing. I make daily life beautiful and functional for bodies that don't cooperate, and I started with my own.
I've been making a case with evidence to people who could turn me down since I was eight, and about twenty years of it was professional. Cars, travel, enrollment, donations. Different products, same job. Then I got sick and found out I'd been training for it. Most people consulting in this space come at it from the institutional side. I come at it as the user, with taste. That's a different angle, not a better one, and I'll tell you honestly whether yours is a room where it fits.
Ugly isn't neutral. If the object you need to get through your day is humiliating to look at, it's because nobody making it ever pictured the person who has to use it.
That's the read I bring to a product: not only whether it works, but whether it's something a person would actually want to live with.
Who I can be useful to.
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The people making the things
If you design or sell products, tools, or equipment for people living with chronic illness or limited mobility, I can be the user with taste in the room before you ship. I'll use it the way your buyer will, tell you where it fails on a bad day, and whether it reads as something a person chose or something a hospital issued. This is consulting, not endorsement. I won't say a product helps a condition, and I don't trade an honest read for free merchandise.
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Healthcare systems and clinical teams
Systems working on patient experience for people with chronic illness, where the friction points usually aren't the ones the internal team expects. I can bring a patient's read to where your system loses trust, and to the small changes that would matter most to the people navigating it.
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Advocacy organizations and nonprofits
Groups building resources, programs, or campaigns for women with chronic illness, who want a set of eyes from inside the population they're serving. I can read your materials, follow the path they put someone on, and tell you what lands as true and what reads as written by someone who's never been the patient.
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Researchers, writers, and journalists
If you're working on a book, study, article, or series about women's chronic illness experience and you need a source who'll talk in specifics instead of generalities, or a reader who can catch what will land wrong with the people you're writing about, I'm open to the conversation.
I'm not a designer who took on accessibility as a cause. I'm the person who has to use the thing, and can tell a good one from a bad one.
The two-flat I'm renovating is the portfolio. It's more convincing than any credential I could hand you.
Scope, briefly.
I take engagements one at a time and scope them tight on purpose. Most of what I do well is bounded: a document review, a strategic read, a few working sessions, a written response. I scope it so a bad week doesn't break it, which means I'll quote a longer timeline than feels necessary and then deliver inside it. For product work, this can grow into an ongoing consulting relationship, as long as there's a real thing being built.
Pricing is by conversation. I'll tell you honestly whether a project fits what I can offer, what a fair scope looks like, and what it's worth. If it isn't a fit, I'll tell you that, too.
A few things I won't do, whatever the budget. I won't call a product a treatment for anything. I won't take free product in place of a fee, or sign away the right to say later that something didn't work. Those honest reads are the whole reason a recommendation from me is worth anything.
If you're building something in this space, tell me about it.
Email is the best way to reach me. A few sentences about what you're building, who it's for, and the kind of help you're looking for is enough to start. I'll get back to you.
Email me