He runs everything but his own health.

About Alpha

I didn't like the system. So I built my own way out.

1991. Surgical ICU, Bridgeport.

I graduated top of my class from a two-year RN program and went straight into the surgical ICU at a Level 1 trauma center in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Nobody put new grads in the ICU back then. It was 1991, the middle of the crack epidemic, and I was 20 years old working full-time nights. Trauma codes. Chest compressions. A chest cracked open at the bedside on my own patient. It made me tough as hell and fearless, and it taught me the thing this practice is built on: the men who end up in that bed almost never saw it coming. The family always says he seemed fine. Nobody had looked.

Anesthesia, and walking away.

That ICU work got me recruited into a nurse anesthesia program, one of only fifty students picked out of thousands. Three years on the rapid response code team: intubations, central lines, nerve blocks, and on-call trauma ORs. I absolutely hated it.

Then 9/11. I was in my senior year, 45 minutes from the city, at a Level 1 trauma center whose specialty was burns. We spent that morning getting ready for the wave: clearing beds, spiking bags, for hours. Then the word came down that there was no wave. Almost nobody survived. And because we lived that close, we knew people who worked in those towers and didn't come home.

Somewhere in that day I decided life was too short to spend on work I despised, and money wasn't a good enough reason to stay. I finished the program and earned my master's in biology. I never took the CRNA exam. I walked away.

Home care, and the note nobody read.

For about seventeen of my years in medicine I did home care, and I loved it. I also watched homebound patients spend an entire day getting to a doctor who never read the note I sent with them. That's what sent me back to school in 2006 for my nurse practitioner degree at Sacred Heart University. They hired me out of my own class to teach critical care and cancer care at Yale New Haven Hospital, which I did until 2013, when my daughter was born and I went into internal medicine.

Florida.

I came to Florida in 2015 and practiced alongside Dr. David Vastola in Palm Beach Gardens until he passed away from Covid two days after Christmas in 2020. He was my boss, my mentor, and my dear friend, and losing him was devastating. I found myself running a fully established 40-year practice, thousands of grieving patients, on my own. I never worked so hard in my life. It taught me that if I could survive that, I could survive anything, and it's what pushed me to start my own practice. It's also where functional medicine stopped being a certification and became how I practice: measure first, then treat.

Full circle.

In August of 2022 I incorporated as Alpha Men's Health & Testosterone Center, LLC. Men's health was the whole point. It started as a side hustle while I worked full time in internal medicine. Then the GLP-1 wave hit and weight loss exploded. I lost over 100 pounds myself, shortened the business name to Alpha Health & Wellness, and rode that wave to 800 patients here in Wellington. I'm so grateful for every single one of them. But it was never where my heart was.

In 2026 Alpha is coming back to what it was built for: hormone optimization and longevity medicine for men, with Alpha Inner Circle as the flagship. Our weight-loss program continues for the patients already in it. Women's hormone optimization is next, and the wait list is open.

Same practice. Same phone number. Same clinician who left the system so she could practice medicine the way it should be done.