I’m Patrick, a physician associate, father of three, and someone who has lived with ADHD my whole life without realizing it until things finally fell apart.

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In January 2025, the Eaton Fire took our home and my practice. In the aftermath—the rebuilding, the stillness, the forced pause—I started to see things more clearly than I ever had before. I had ADHD. And so did my kids.

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We’d been getting calls from my son’s teacher for months. They saw defiance and disruption. We saw something different. A good kid whose brain simply worked in a way the classroom wasn’t designed for. He wasn’t broken—he was misunderstood. And, looking back, so was I for more than forty years.

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So I did what I tend to do when something finally clicks: I went all in. I revisited everything I knew from over a decade of clinical practice and looked at ADHD through a functional medicine lens. Diet, lifestyle, sleep, movement, supplements. We changed how we ate, how we structured our days, and how we showed up as a family.

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By the end of the school year, his teachers were saying he seemed like a different kid. He wasn’t. He was just more himself, in an environment that finally supported how his brain works.

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As we started sharing what we were learning, the responses surprised us. Parent after parent, family after family, all carrying the same weight, all looking for something that felt missing in the conversation around ADHD. Not just medication, but a more complete way to understand ADHD

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That’s why ADHD and Awesome exists. We wanted to put into words what so many families were already living but couldn’t quite name.