Hi! I'm Arwyn.
I’ve been a nurse since 2007, working across specialties that taught me invaluable lessons – neurosurgery, internal medicine, pulmonary and sleep, vascular interventional radiology, and most recently, rheumatology. I earned my master’s as an adult nurse practitioner in 2012 and spent years in both large academic systems and small independent practices.
On paper, I have the credentials. In reality, my body has been my greatest teacher.
My symptoms started in 2012 while living in Milwaukee, though I didn’t know it at the time. I was a new NP working in neurosurgery, with long, irregular hours and mandatory night call when I developed left shoulder weakness and hand pain that made it difficult to braid my hair and hold on to things.
After moving to Denver in 2014, I became the sole NP in a growing practice – a young practitioner working 5 days a week in clinic plus traveling three hours each way twice a month to Kansas, with no external support and an untenable workload. It was difficult to carry all my things, and the frequent travel was arduous. My hands grew more painful, and frequently turned white and numb. My colleague told me to get evaluated for autoimmune disease and shortly after, I was diagnosed with lupus and Sjögren’s.
The diagnosis gave me permission to finally advocate for myself, to ask for a schedule that didn't destroy me. But the situation remained impossible, and I left.
It was during those long drives to Kansas, sitting in the backseat of my boss’s car, that I discovered life coaching. I started my journey with BARE, and later became certified in life and weight loss coaching through the Life Coach School. I was learning how to help people change their lives while trying to figure out how to live my own.
In 2020, right after my 36th birthday, at the height of COVID, I had a venous clot in my brain. I needed an emergency thrombectomy and spent a week hospitalized while the nation was on lockdown. No one could explain what had happened or what to do about it.
That’s when I found functional medicine – not in a classroom, but out of desperation, searching for answers conventional medicine couldn’t give me.
When I moved home in 2023 to help my aging parents navigate dementia and the difficult realities of getting older, rheumatology felt like the perfect fit. Who better to help people with autoimmune disease than someone living it? But working within the conventional system, I watched my own health deteriorate. I watched patients suffer without having the capacity to truly help them. I witnessed our medical system fail people over and over again – the same people I went into medicine to serve.
Recently, I developed autoimmune alopecia areata. My hair is falling out in patches – a literal, visible representation of my body asking me to clear space, to make room for something different. It’s the invitation I needed to start doing things differently.
The Tender Root grew from all of it – the untenable work situations, the diagnoses that forced me to advocate for myself, the brain clot that sent me searching beyond conventional answers, the patients I couldn’t fully help within a broken system, and finally, my body showing me it’s time.
Now I help people who aren’t getting what they need from conventional healthcare through advocacy, education, and mentorship. I blend clinical expertise, functional/integrative medicine, skilled coaching, and lived experience to help clients understand and trust their body and navigate the healthcare system, while partnering with them on their unique path to whole life health.
We tend to the inner ecosystem and build foundations that fortify vitality, grow agency, shift the outer landscape, and ultimately change the trajectory to sustainable better living.
Because I know what it’s like to be told everything’s fine when you know it’s not. To have a diagnosis but no roadmap. To need more than a prescription and a follow-up in three months. To be failed by the very system that’s supposed to help you heal.
From tender roots we grow. We fall apart. And then we flourish.