Where some kids go to camp, others spend their summer scrubbing other people’s toilets.

I was the latter.

A working class kid from the south side of San Antonio, I did not realize that not all kids begin the race at the same starting line.

Today, as a pediatrician caring for children harmed by the same systems that shaped my own life—I do.

I grew up between a trailer park and a quarantine yard for diseased cattle. I was a kid on free lunch without health insurance. When I was eight, my neighbors, a seven-year-old girl and her father, were shot to death with 30 rounds of gunfire from a high caliber semi-automatic assault rifle.

I was repeatedly told kids like you do not go to college.

I went anyway.

And then built a career doing everything in my power to stand up for and improve the lives of kids like me.

I earned a full-tuition scholarship to medical school and trained as a pediatrician, believing that caring for children at the bedside would be enough.

Early in my career, however, I came to understand I was wrong.

My patients’ health was shaped far more by policy decisions and systemic inequities than by anything I could do during a hospital admission.

Today, I am a board-certified hospital-based pediatrician with over a decade of experience advocating for child-health policy reform.

I am also a mother and a human striving to leave the world a little better than I found it for my kids, and for everyone else’s.

Every policy decision ultimately shapes children’s lives, and yet kids are rarely centered in our policy-making process.

Through story, I aim to expose the often-invisible ways laws shape childhood itself.

I write about:

• Growing up inside systems that treat some children as sacred and others as expendable

• What it means to care for these kids as a pediatrician

• The policy decisions and systems that shape their futures

• And what happens when ordinary people stand up to challenge those systems.

Because meaningful change rarely comes only from experts or institutions.

It comes from ordinary people who decide to show up for the next generation.

When you subscribe you will get essays, reflections, and small but meaningful actions you can take to help build a better world for our kids.

If you’ve ever looked at the state of the world and thought:

Someone should do something.

Subscribe.

Because the truth is:

You already are that someone.

We all are.

Expect to see me in your inbox about once a week—and eventually, hopefully, on your bookshelf too.