A lifetime of questions.

I often say that Countdown was born from a lifetime of questions. Long before I ever heard the word mitochondria, I was searching for answers.

I was born with a heart murmur and significant hypotonia. For the first year of my life, I slept with bars on my legs every night. As a young child, my parents would listen as I cried from what doctors called “growing pains.” Except the pain never really went away.

The irony is that I was always the girl in motion. I loved to dance. I was active, driven, determined, and full of energy. From the outside, very few people would have guessed anything was wrong.

But from a very young age, my body was telling a different story.

I lived with constant pain in my muscles, joints, hips, hands, and neck. My legs would unexpectedly buckle beneath me. I was always looking for something to lean against—a wall, a counter, a shopping cart—because my body rarely felt stable. At times, my neck felt so unstable it was like a bobblehead, as though it could barely support the weight of my head. I learned to push through it because I didn’t know any other way.

I could accomplish almost anything— for a while. Then I would crash. People assumed I was simply doing too much, stressed, anxious, or even depressed. What I know now is that my body wasn’t running out of determination. It was struggling to produce energy at the cellular level.

My mind wanted to keep going, but my body often could not keep up.

Because I looked healthy, people assumed I was healthy. In many ways, I felt like I was living a double life. The world saw someone who was energetic, driven, and always smiling. What they didn’t see was the constant pain, the instability, how hard I was working just to keep up, or what happened after I got home. I became incredibly good at hiding what was happening because I didn’t want people to see me as weak or incapable.

Then I became a mother.

The road to motherhood was not straightforward. Before welcoming my first child, I experienced a miscarriage—another chapter in what felt like an ever-growing list of health questions. When my first son was born, he was delayed in walking and talking. He struggled with chronic ear infections and eventually required surgery to remove his tonsils and adenoids.

My second son underwent emergency adenoid surgery at just ten months old after months of struggling to breathe. For much of his first year, I held him upright to sleep because breathing while lying down was so difficult.

My third son faced many of the same challenges. He was diagnosed with laryngomalacia and underwent a supraglottoplasty at just six months old. Forty-five minutes after delivering my third son, my own life changed forever.

I suffered a stroke.

I didn’t know it then, but the questions I had been asking about my own health since childhood were far from over.

Initially, doctors dismissed it as a vagal response. Looking back, I realize it was another piece of a puzzle no one yet understood.

Then our daughter arrived.

She was born blue and struggling to breathe.

Every feeding became terrifying. She would choke, turn blue, and fight for air. At just five weeks old, she underwent a supraglottoplasty for severe laryngomalacia. When her symptoms persisted, we discovered she was silently aspirating and required a feeding tube. Like me, she was profoundly low tone.

I knew I was her mother, but I also knew I had to become her advocate. If I didn’t fight for her, no one else would.

Doctor after doctor told us it would likely take years before she would be able to come off the feeding tube.

As my children grew, I couldn’t ignore what I was seeing. All four of my children had low muscle tone. Many shared the same challenges I had experienced growing up. For years, I was told these were separate stories. I believed they were chapters of the same one.

But I refused to accept that.

Then my own health began to unravel.

What felt like an overnight decline left me weighing just 85 pounds. My hair was falling out. I developed severe tremors, Raynaud’s, cognitive issues, speech difficulties, and increasing trouble walking. The woman who had spent her entire life pushing through pain suddenly couldn’t push anymore.

I spent years moving from specialist to specialist. Every physician focused on a different symptom, a different diagnosis, or a different body system. No one seemed to be asking the question I couldn’t stop asking:

How did all of these pieces fit together?

At one point, the Mayo Clinic initially agreed to evaluate me. Later, they declined, explaining that my case was simply too complex. One physician even referred to me as a “zebra”—medical shorthand for someone whose symptoms didn’t fit neatly into a diagnosis.

For decades, everyone was focused on naming my symptoms.

I was searching for what connected them.

Eventually, I was diagnosed with mitochondrial dysfunction, mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), dysautonomia, celiac disease, and features of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

But the diagnoses still didn’t answer my biggest question.

How could all of these conditions exist together and not be connected?

The more I learned, the more everything began to make sense.

Mitochondria do far more than produce energy. Every organ depends on them. Every cell relies on them.

They help regulate metabolism, power our muscles, fuel our brains, support our immune systems, repair our cells, influence how we age, and sustain nearly every function that keeps us alive.

The more I learned, the more convinced I became that mitochondria represented one of the greatest untapped opportunities in medicine.

Not just for rare disease.

For all of human health.

I realized the problem wasn’t simply that I had spent a lifetime searching for answers.

The problem was that millions of other people were searching too.

The science remained fragmented, underfunded, and disconnected. If that didn’t change, countless other families would continue asking the very same questions mine had spent decades asking.

That realization became Countdown.

I never imagined starting a nonprofit. I never imagined funding research, bringing together scientists from around the world, building a community, partnering with visionary brands, or helping lead a movement.

I simply knew that if cellular energy sits at the foundation of human health, then mitochondria deserved to be at the center of medicine.

Countdown was born from the belief that we could no longer afford to study disease in silos. That by understanding and advancing mitochondrial science, we have the opportunity to change how we prevent, diagnose, and treat disease—and ultimately transform the future of human health.

My health did not improve overnight.

Today, staying well requires constant intention. I rely on physical therapy, myofascial therapy, red light therapy, infrared sauna, yoga, Gyrotonic movement, targeted supplementation, mitochondrial support protocols, infusions, and the guidance of a trusted naturopathic physician.

Even with those supports, there are still days when my body reminds me of its limitations. There are days when my hands become so weak I can barely hold a pen, and my handwriting is almost illegible. There are evenings when my husband quietly cuts my food because my hands won’t cooperate. There are still days when he and my oldest son help me up the stairs because my body simply won’t cooperate.

Those moments are difficult. They are humbling. They are frustrating. They are not the life I imagined.

But they are also a daily reminder of why this work matters.
No family should have to spend years searching for answers. No patient should have to move from specialist to specialist, collecting diagnoses without anyone stepping back to ask how the pieces fit together. No one should be left wondering whether the symptoms affecting them, their children, or generations of their family might all be connected.

That is why Countdown exists.

Today, Countdown is the first and only nonprofit dedicated to accelerating mitochondrial science and medicine across the full spectrum of human health. We fund bold, high-risk, high-reward research, advance public understanding, foster collaboration, and bring together scientists, clinicians, innovators, philanthropists, investors, and visionary brands to help shape the future of health.

What began as my personal search for answers has become a mission to transform how the world understands health.

My story began with questions.

Countdown exists to help find answers.

Because the future of health begins with energy.

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