The Day I Lost My Baby Was the Day I Knew the Dental House Was Done

In October, my server crashed and took a year and a half of patient data with it.

That alone should have been the final straw. But it wasn’t.

I wasn’t ready to let go. Not yet.

Instead, I did what I always do when everything is on fire—I recommitted. For the seventeenth time.

I doubled down. I forced myself to believe that I wanted this practice to work. That I could fix it. That I should be able to fix it.

That’s the thing about having ADHD. You second-guess your intuition constantly. You learn to outsource your sense of what’s right to the people around you—mentors, colleagues, society. And everyone kept telling me not to give up. That it would all be worth it. That if I just pushed a little harder, it would get easier.

So I kept going.

I kept seeing patients. Kept showing up every day to the same building where I felt like I was slowly dissolving. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t eating. I was emotionally numb but physically sick.

I had lost my joy, my purpose, and the vision that once gave this practice its heartbeat.

And then—just when I thought maybe, just maybe, something beautiful could still come out of all this—we got a miracle.

We found out we were pregnant.

We were stunned. Overjoyed. It felt like the light cracking through the wreckage. We started making plans.

We let ourselves hope.

Until one day, during a routine appointment, we sat in that quiet room and waited to hear our baby’s heartbeat.

Instead, we heard silence.

And in that silence… something in me broke.

Not just from grief, but from truth.

The miscarriage didn’t just take our baby.

It took my illusion that I could keep doing this—that I should keep doing this.

I had spent months forcing myself to show up. To act like I still believed in the dream I had built.

But in that moment, everything stopped. The momentum, the noise, the denial.

It all fell silent.

And in that silence, I finally heard me.

The me who had been screaming inside for months, maybe years.

The me who was done trying to prove I could carry everything.

The me who no longer wanted to rebuild something that didn’t feel like home anymore.

The Dental House was born from my vision. My sweat. My obsession with doing it right.

But the truth is: it almost killed me.

And in some ways, it did.

Letting go wasn’t instant. I didn’t shut the doors the next day.

But I knew—from that moment on—I was done pretending.

The grief cracked me open. It stripped away everything I had been using to hold myself together: perfectionism, pride, productivity.

And what was left was something quieter.

More honest.

More human.

Somewhere along the line, I had forgotten that I’m allowed to change.

That walking away isn’t failure—it’s self-trust.

It’s choosing life over image. Peace over performance.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you’re grieving—whether it’s a person, a dream, or a version of yourself—you don’t have to power through it.

You don’t have to stay somewhere just because you built it.

Sometimes the bravest thing you’ll ever do is let it fall.

If this story hit close to home—whether you’re carrying grief, burnout, or just the weight of pretending everything’s fine—you’re not alone.

I’m building a space for dentists (and anyone else quietly unraveling) to tell the truth, reclaim their lives, and rebuild with intention.

It’s called The Reconstructed Dentist—and it’s more than just a brand. It’s my way of saying: you can walk away. You can start over. You can choose yourself.

I share weekly essays, behind-the-scenes of what I’m creating next, and honest conversations about what healing actually looks like.