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Lisa F. Crites is the award-winning inventor of The SHOWER SHIRT®, having won a 2015 InnovateHER series, sponsored by the SBA, Washington Post, and Microsoft. Lisa also received a 2015 Patient Innovation award from the University of Portugal, School of Business & Economics, and presented at the World Government Summit – Edge of Government exhibit in the United Arab Emirates.

Healing is often portrayed as a straight line. You get sick. You get treated. You get better. There’s a before and an after, a clear point where everything is supposed to shift back into place. But anyone who has actually lived through illness knows it doesn’t work that way.

It is widely understood that surviving a life-threatening experience changes a person completely. Whether welcomed or not, that change settles in. The real questions often come later, when life slows down, and no one is watching. What do you do with whom you have become? Do you move through the change, or do you let it break you?

Lisa Crites’ story is one shaped by loss, illness, and an unflinching honesty about what it means to endure. As a cancer survivor and the author of Beautifully Unbroken, she does not present faith as something tidy or reassuring. Instead, her experience reveals faith as something lived moment by moment, often in uncertainty, often without answers.

Some inventions begin in laboratories. Others begin in boardrooms. Lisa F. Crites’ story began in a bathroom, standing inside a trash bag, trying to shower after a mastectomy.

For Lisa Crites, grief didn’t come in a neat, single chapter. It came layered. First, the sudden loss of her mother. Then, before the ground had time to settle, a breast cancer diagnosis. There was no emotional recovery period, no gentle transition. Just the sharp realization that life had changed again, and permanently.

Hospitals, doctors, nurses and their team of clinicians are usually phenomenal in getting patients through surgery. They are less prepared for what happens once you go home. Lisa Crites learned this quickly after her mastectomy. The procedure was successful. The plan was clear. But recovery, the real kind—the kind that happens alone in your bathroom, in front of your mirror—felt strangely unsupported.