Patient Leader Certification: What's Your 60 Second Pitch?
What is your 60-second pitch? In other words, what would you say to someone to summarize who you are in 60 seconds or less?
Share your pitch here, and read other Patient Leaders' pitches! Remember that as you evolve in your Patient Leader journey, your pitch may evolve, too!
Who I am today starts with who I was before rheumatoid arthritis.
I was an athlete. I earned a full basketball scholarship, captained my team, and scored 1,398 career points. After college, I reinvented myself as a runner, completing half marathons and marathons, including the Boston Marathon two years in a row.
But eventually & for the first time ever my body stopped responding the way I expected. I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and I had to ask myself a question: Who am I when my body can no longer do what it used to?
I had reinvented myself before, and I knew I could do it again.
For the next 17 years, I learned how to live with an autoimmune disease while raising my family, navigating the hard days, and learning when to push and when to rest.
Today, I channel those experiences into The Autoimmune Mom Podcast, which I launched in February 2026 to help other mothers navigate life with autoimmune disease. I've been building The Autoimmune Mom Podcast, creating conversations that help mothers feel less alone while navigating life with autoimmune disease. What excites me most is turning something that has challenged my own identity into a way to connect with and support other women. I'm proud that I'm not just adapting to this next chapter of my life — I'm finding a way to make it meaningful for other people, too.
My name is Melissa McNulty and I am an educator, writer, and a patient navigating life with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Arriving at a diagnosis put so many puzzle pieces from my life into place. While having a name for my condition was comforting, learning that there was no treatment was difficult. I have learned a lot over the past several years about symptom management, and at the same time, new symptoms appear all the time that require new ways of learning to cope. Most recently, my condition has decided to impact my vocal cords. As you can imagine, this has been a difficult adjustment as a nursing professor. While EDS might be causing my voice to fade, I still have a lot to say and contribute to those who are impacted by this condition. I have decided that I want to use my written words to reach others and to offer support to those impacted not only by EDS but also chronic illness in general. There is so much we can learn from one another about our health journeys.
My name is Cristian Rojas, and I’m a mental health advocate, educator, and someone who has learned to build a meaningful life while living with serious mental health challenges.
My journey changed in 2016 when I experienced my first psychotic episode and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. At the time, I was told that finishing college might not be possible and that my life could be very limited. But I refused to let a diagnosis write the rest of my story.
My journey hasn’t been perfect. I’ve experienced setbacks, additional episodes, anxiety, depression, and moments when I had to start over. But I also graduated from college, became an educator, traveled, served others, and began sharing my story openly online.
Today, I use my experiences to advocate for people living with schizophrenia and other mental health conditions, while also supporting the families who love them. I want to challenge stigma and show that recovery doesn’t mean having a perfect life. It means continuing to build a life with purpose, hope, and second chances.I'm Hope and I have Myasthenia gravis and Graves disease along with other assorted conditions. I'm here to help and advocate as well as learn because even though I've had 28 years with my rare, invisible, autoimmune illnesses there is so much value in the different and shared experience I have with others like myself.
