Season Four · Episode Twenty-Two · Nancy Deyo
You Don’t Have to Go Back
Rebuilding Life After Chronic Pain and Opioid Dependence
What if healing is not getting your old life back?
Nancy Deyo learned early to measure her worth through achievement. She became an athlete, an early female technology executive in Silicon Valley and the founder of Purple Moon, a company created to help preteen girls engage with technology.
After a back injury, a dangerous descent from Mount Kilimanjaro and years of chronic pain, medical uncertainty and prescription opioid dependence, pushing harder could no longer carry her forward. Nancy’s story asks what resilience becomes when returning to who you were is no longer the goal.
Before · The change · What came next
Before
Growing up one year behind an extraordinarily gifted sister, Nancy searched for places where she could prove herself. Piano, athletics, business leadership and entrepreneurship became achievements—and also a way of establishing her worth.
The change
After Purple Moon failed, Nancy sought redemption by attempting to climb Mount Kilimanjaro despite a serious back injury. At 16,000 feet, she could no longer move her legs. The strategy she had trusted all her life—push harder—had finally stopped working.
What came next
Recovery was slow and nonlinear. Nancy learned to walk again, returned to graduate school while unable to sit, rebuilt her strength and tapered off prescription opioids with her physician. She began defining resilience as acceptance, adaptation and building a meaningful life from where she actually was.
“Resilience doesn’t mean you’re bouncing back and becoming who you were.”
Nancy Deyo
Listen to Nancy Deyo’s story
You Don’t Have to Go Back premieres March 2, 2027. Listening links will be added when the episode is released.