— Caregiver advocate, healthcare professional, and someone who understands how heavy caregiving can feel.
Caregiving has always been woven into my life. I grew up in a healthcare-centered home, watching my mother work as a nurse and learning from an early age what compassion, patience, and caring for others truly looked like. Long before I ever worked in healthcare professionally, I was being shaped by the quiet lessons of caregiving happening right in front of me.
But caregiving became deeply personal in another way, too. For more than 20 years, I helped care for my own mother through seasons that required patience, advocacy, sacrifice, and love. I understand what it feels like to worry about someone you love, to carry responsibility that never fully turns off, and to quietly hold everything together while trying not to lose yourself in the process.
Over the years, I’ve also supported individuals and families through dementia, hospice, aging, serious illness, and life-changing transitions. I created Derna’s Caregiving Haven because caregivers deserve a calm and compassionate place where someone truly understands.
Hello, I'm Derna
Experience rooted in both compassion and healthcare
My background includes decades of caregiving experience alongside years spent working in healthcare, patient support, dementia care, hospice support, and clinical settings. As a Doctor of Chiropractic and healthcare professional, I’ve spent much of my life educating, advocating for, and supporting people through difficult moments and major transitions.
But the truth is, caregiving cannot be fully understood through training alone. What caregivers need most is often practical guidance, emotional support, patience, and someone who understands both the medical side and the deeply human side of this journey.
Why this work matters so deeply to me
Caregiving changes you. It stretches your heart, your patience, your strength, and sometimes even your identity. It can be beautiful, heartbreaking, exhausting, meaningful, lonely, and deeply loving — sometimes all in the same day.
After years of both personal and professional caregiving, I realized something important: caregivers are often expected to keep going while carrying impossible emotional weight with very little support for themselves.
I created this space because I know what it feels like to need someone who simply understands — someone who won't judge, overwhelm, or minimize what caregiving actually feels like.