In 2009, I was one of five Texas women who started Boot Campaign. It began as a distraction during a stressful season of my life. Seventeen years later, it’s one of the things I’m proudest of.
Back then, my job was building something bigger than myself. I learned operations, board governance, and how to keep going when you’re figuring it out as you go.
Today I sit in a different chair. Through The Villages Gym & Wellness, I’m a wellness partner to Boot Campaign, running a program for veterans they refer and fund. Veterans come to us from all over the country. They spend a week with us in Houston at the start, another at the six-month mark, and the rest of the work happens virtually, week after week.
That shift changed my relationship with medicine again.
As a co-founder, I saw veteran health from the outside. As a wellness partner, I see it from the inside. Many of the veterans we work with arrive having been through more assessments, protocols, and appointments than I could list. They have doctors. They have plans.
What they rarely have is someone helping them carry those plans into daily life.
So I stopped thinking of medicine and wellness as separate lanes that occasionally cross. Their physicians remain the medical authority. Our job is to help each veteran understand what they’ve been told and live it between appointments.
One veteran became more consistent with his blood pressure medication once he understood how blood pressure actually works. Nobody on our team prescribed anything. We helped him understand the why behind what his doctor had already asked him to do.
That’s the moment I think about most. The medicine was right. The missing piece was follow-through.
It also changed how I see physicians. I continue to have so much respect for physicians and empathy for their misunderstood limitations. I see how much they’re asked to hold inside a single visit.
Boot Campaign taught me how to build something bigger than myself. Being a wellness partner taught me that the best care happens when medicine and wellness collaborate for exponentially better patient outcomes.
To the physicians, veterans, and advocates in my network: where have you seen the gap between treatment and real results finally close?
