At 33, Dr. Jaclyn Tolentino was working long hours as a concierge primary care doctor in Miami when her husband found a lump on her body while they were playing on the beach. She was young, busy, and not expecting cancer to be part of her story. But within days, her life became a blur of tests, waiting, research, fear, and difficult decisions.
A decade later, Dr. Jaclyn looks back on that experience not as a neat before-and-after story, but as an ongoing process of learning how to listen to her body again. Her diagnosis changed the way she thought about medicine, stress, fertility, and what it means to feel safe inside yourself. It also led her to functional medicine, where she now spends more time helping patients understand the systems underneath their symptoms and make care decisions that feel informed and collaborative.
In this conversation, Rachel and Dr. Jaclyn talk about the reality of a diagnosis, why it can be important to slow down and seek additional opinions, what may be missing after treatment ends, and how she rebuilt hope through IVF, motherhood, community, writing, and small daily acts of self-care. This is a conversation about resilience, body trust, and creating space for a new story.
🎙 WHAT’S COVERED IN THIS EPISODE
⭐️ How Dr. Jaclyn’s cancer diagnosis reshaped her approach to medicine and healing
⭐️ Why slowing down, asking questions, and seeking additional opinions matters after a diagnosis
⭐️ The connection between stress, gut health, hormones, and the body’s ability to heal
⭐️ Navigating fertility, IVF, motherhood, and making space for a different timeline
⭐️ Rebuilding trust in your body through self-care, support, and health advocacy
🎙 ABOUT THE GUEST
Dr. Jaclyn Tolentino is a functional medicine physician and breast cancer survivor whose approach to care was shaped by her own diagnosis in her early 30s. After undergoing a double mastectomy, fertility preservation, and years of IVF, she began asking deeper questions about what happens during treatment—and what support can look like after it ends.
Today, she works with patients through a root-cause and integrative lens, combining conventional medical care with deeper conversations about physiology, stress, hormones, gut health, and lifestyle. In this episode, she shares what she learned about rebuilding trust in her body, navigating fertility, and becoming a mother after cancer.
To connect with Dr. Jaclyn Tolentino:
Instagram: @drjaclyntolentino
Website: drjaclyntolentino.com
✨ TOP 5 TAKEAWAYS
✦ You are allowed to slow down after a diagnosis. A cancer diagnosis can make everything feel urgent, but Dr. Jaclyn encourages patients to create enough space to understand their options, ask questions, and find a care team they trust. Seeking a second or third opinion is not indecision. It can be part of making an informed choice.
✦ Healing is not only about what happens during treatment. After a double mastectomy and hormone-suppressive treatment, Dr. Jaclyn realized that being told to “go back to living” did not reflect what her body or mind had been through. The period after treatment can bring its own questions about hormones, fertility, immunity, stress, identity, and how to feel at home in your body again.
✦ The body is not a collection of separate symptoms. Functional medicine asks what may be happening underneath the surface and how systems connect. Dr. Jaclyn talks about the relationship between stress, sleep, food, hormones, the gut microbiome, nutrient absorption, medications, and environmental exposures not as a single explanation for a complex disease, but as part of a fuller conversation about health.
✦ Small changes can be meaningful. During her recovery, Dr. Jaclyn began by looking at the products she used every day and making changes one step at a time. The goal was not perfection or another impossible list of rules. It was to notice what was within her control and make choices that helped her feel more supported.
✦ Hope sometimes needs room to arrive differently than expected. Dr. Jaclyn’s path to motherhood included IVF, loss, uncertainty, and an eight-year journey. Over time, she learned to release the image of a perfect timeline and create more space for rest, self-care, support, and a different version of the life she hoped for.
💛 RACHEL'S FAVORITE MOMENTS
I loved the way Dr. Jaclyn described the moment she realized she could not simply return to the life she had been living before cancer. I think about that point often as I navigate my own cancer diagnosis and how I want to evolve and transform my own life (for the second time). The diagnosis did not only change her treatment plan, it changed the questions she was willing to ask about her body, her work, her stress, her future, and the kind of doctor she wanted to become.
I also kept thinking about what she said about creating safety in the body. Sometimes we imagine healing has to look like a major transformation or a perfectly executed wellness routine. But for Dr. Jaclyn, it could be sitting outside with her family, putting down her phone, writing in a journal, or letting herself feel what she was actually feeling instead of rushing to turn fear into positivity.
And I loved hearing her talk about motherhood with so much honesty. There was no pretending that the journey was easy or linear. There were failed cycles, grief, frustration, and moments when she had to release the timeline she thought her life would follow. Her story is a reminder that hope can be held alongside uncertainty and that sometimes creating space for a new story is part of how we begin to live it.
⏸ PAUSE HERE
What has your body been trying to tell you that you have been explaining away?
Maybe it is fatigue that you have blamed on work, stress that you have normalized, a cycle change, a recurring symptom, or a feeling that something is not quite right. You do not have to diagnose yourself or solve everything today. But you can begin by listening, writing down what you notice, asking a better question, or finding a practitioner who is willing to look at the bigger picture with you.
And if you are moving through fear, what would it look like to let the fear be there without letting it make every decision for you?
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