About your advocate

Before I became sick, I was healthy. I worked for years in ophthalmology, including as a surgical coordinator, and also worked as a certified personal trainer. I had a career, independence, and a normal life. I had no idea what it meant to become a “complex patient,” because I had never needed to.

My background was already tied to healthcare. As a surgical coordinator, I worked around physicians, patients, testing, procedures, scheduling, referrals, and the administrative machinery that keeps medical care moving. As a personal trainer, my job was different, but the underlying skill was similar: listen carefully, understand the whole person in front of me, identify what matters, and turn a complicated situation into an actual plan.

Then I became the patient.

What followed was a three-year journey through serious neurological illness, hospitalizations, specialists, extensive testing, conflicting opinions, treatment failures, insurance problems, records spread across multiple health systems, and long stretches where there were far more questions than answers.

I learned what it feels like to sit in front of a physician with ten important questions and leave having asked two.

I learned how easily one abnormal result can disappear into hundreds of pages of records.

I learned that one specialist may never see what another specialist documented six months earlier.

I learned how exhausting it is to repeatedly explain the same history when you’re already sick, scared, cognitively overloaded, or simply too tired to keep managing the logistics of your own care.

And I learned how different a complicated case looks when somebody finally has the time to sit down, organize the whole thing, and start connecting the dots.

That experience changed the direction of my life.

I wanted to become the person I needed.

During the hardest parts of my own illness, there was a type of person I kept wishing existed.

Someone who would actually read everything.

Someone who would understand that the important detail might be buried on page 184 of a hospital record.

Someone who would remember what one specialist said while I was sitting in front of another.

Someone who could make the phone calls when I didn’t have the energy, organize the records when my brain couldn’t handle another portal, prepare the questions when I was too overwhelmed to know where to start, and keep pushing when I had reached my limit.

I wanted someone who could look at the entire mess and say, “Give it to me. I’ll help you make sense of this.”

Eventually, I realized I wanted to become that person for somebody else.

That is why I built Pocket Advocate.

Not because I believe I can replace your doctors. I can’t, and that isn’t the job.

I built it because I know how much can fall between the cracks when a very sick person is also expected to be their own researcher, records department, appointment coordinator, historian, and project manager.

My job is to take some of that weight off you.

To know your case. To organize it. To ask better questions. To find what is missing. To help you understand your options. To make the calls. To follow the loose ends. And when the system becomes too much for you to manage alone, to be the person in your corner who keeps the case moving.

I became an advocate because, for three years, I learned exactly how badly I needed one.

- Eric, founder of Pocket Advocate