We were lucky to catch up with Lilianne Cooper recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Lilianne thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

Growing up in NJ, i was diagnosed with allergies, asthma, and eczema as a toddler The standard treatment for these conditions has always been some form of steroids, either inhaled for the asthma or topical creams/ointments for the eczema. For my skin, symptoms would get worse in the colder months, but resolve in they Spring and Summer months.
In August, 2015, I was working as a full , night-shift nurse at a large teaching hospital in San Francisco.,CA. My eczema flare was not improving with my usually topical steroid ointment and my skin had become super thin. My last trip to my Dermatologist, they offered my “biologics,” which essentially is low-dose chemo therapy. This concept made no sense to me, so I said thank you and never returned. That day I stopped using my prescription steroids, and within a week, I started to experience severe symptoms of Topical Steroid Withdrawal.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Lilianne Cooper, but you can call me Lili! I’ve been a registered nurse for 22 years, currently living in Long Beach, CA. Originally grew up in northern New Jersey, I completed my bachelors degree in nursing at Boston College in 2002, and ended up taking a position as a travel nurse in 2005. This brought me out to California, where I took multiple assignments in San Diego and San Francisco. In 2015, I went through a healing crisis that forced me to go out on disability for over a year. At this point, I had to make the decision to transition from bedside nurse to case management. After two years, my body was no longer aligned with the my hospital position and I made the tough decision to take early retirement at age 39 yrs old. I found myself in unknown territory, but finding a work-study opportunity at a sound healing facility in the Bay area. After unknowingly agreeing to a six-month sound healing certification program, I made the decision to leave the Bay area and move down to Long Beach, eventually finding a new position at a Wellness Clinic in Belmont Shore. After that clinic closed in 2023, I found myself unemployed and making a cold call to another IV therapy company in August 2023. Dripp IV Therapy had just opened a new location in Long Beach and were looking for new staff nurses. The rest, as they say, is history. I recently got promoted to a Lead Nurse position in the company, which also affords me time to be a sound bath facilitator for both private, as well as community events. So when I’m not doing Vitamin therapy services for Dripp IV, I am collaborating with my community at various sound healing events.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

In 2015, I found myself in a health crisis that I was not prepared for by any means. Ever since I was a toddler, I had been prescribed some form of steroids for asthma, eczema, and allergies. Usually my eczema was worse in the colder months, but I would use topical steroids on my skin to treat my eczema as prescribed by my doctors. For the next +30 years, my eczema would fluctuate, as the potencies of my steroid ointments would to accommodate rapid healing of my skin.
Fast forward to 2015, I’m living in San Francisco, CA, working 12hour night shifts as a bedside nurse. At this time, my eczema flare was not healing after using my go-to topical steroid ointment. My dermatologist at the time recommended starting a “Biologic” agent instead, which essentially is low-dose chemotherapy agent. In my nurse mind, there’s no indication a chemotherapy agent should be used for a chronic inflammatory diagnosis. Period. That day in September, 2015, I made the decision to stop using my steroid topicals cold-turkey and never return to her office. Within less than a week, by body started to exhibit signs of withdrawal from +30 years of topical steroid use. I had no idea what was happening, so I made an appointment with my PCP. She had no idea what was happening either, but she recalls having a similar patient who experienced adrenal crisis as a result of extended, synthetic-steroid use. Luckily, she respected my decision not to restart a course of steroids to combat all my symptoms, but a set of blood work ended up buying me an Oncology appointment to assess for an acute cancerous process. Thankfully, they got me right in since I worked for the hospital already, and they concluded it wasn’t cancer.
So what was it? Topical Steroid Withdrawal seems to be the elusive unicorn diagnosis of the dermatological world that more and more people find themselves in when they decide to quit their topical steroid use. For me, this was the most traumatic period of my adult life, and I would. Never recommend it for anyone; not even my worst enemy. Over period of two years, my symptoms included:
Rapid heart rate, palpitations, horrible insomnia for 3-4 months, severe nerve pain in multiple areas of the body, extreme oozing and flaking of the skin, severe swelling of arms, legs, and face, hair loss, burry eye vision, digestive issues, panic attacks, severe anxiety and depression, re-occurring lymph nodes, loss of menstruation for 8 months, clogged ear canals, and blood work indicating potential cancerous process.

Have you ever had to pivot?

My first pivot in my career was in 2016. After coming back from short-term disability after a little over a year, I attempted to go back to doing 12-hour shifts as a bedside nurse; eating the same diet, drinking the same caffeine, sleeping the same hours. Needless to say, efforts were futile. Unfortunately my manager couldn’t accommodate modified hours, as my disability was a result of a chronic health condition rather than a short-term injury (ie broken arm while on the job). It was either change departments of leave the hospital all together. After a painful meeting with my manager, union rep, Human Resources, etc, I made the decision to change departments to Case Management.
This position meant switching to working Monday through Friday, 8 hours a day. Majority of my career had been three 12hour shifts per week, so this was a dramatic change. Within two to three months, I gained 15-20 lbs, switched my sleeping schedule to day shift, and learned so many new things about our insurance systems. By month six or seven, I had found my feet in my new role and was operating independently in my new department as a nurse case manager.
My second pivot came at the beginning of 2020. At this point I had passed my two-year mark in my new department, but had to go out on short-term disability briefly as my health declined again now that I was no longer taking my topical steroids for my skin. I was coordinating discharge planning for patients to go home from their hospital stay, and constantly begging insurance companies to cover the smallest things that they eventually denied. My heart was constantly breaking every time I had to go “break the news” to a patient who thought their insurance would cover a part of their hospitalization. January 6, 2020, I told my manager I couldn’t keep taking short-term leaves and keep up then pace of my position; I ended up taking early retirement. Since I wasn’t 65 years old, I agreed to forfeit several thousand dollars of my pension in order to take it out as a lump sum. At the time, the money didn’t matter.
I ended up cashing out my life insurance, 403B, and took a break for several months. In the meantime, I ended up taking a work-study position at a sound healing facility in the Bay Area, run by a gentleman who had been in this business for almost four decades. In exchange for working in the store, I thought the agreement was that I could choose some classes he taught through his sound healing school. Nope! Turns out I was saying Yes to a six-month Sound healing certification course, both online and in the classroom valued at over two thousand dollars. After completing the this program, my lease was up in Berkeley and I was guided to move to Long Beach, CA. Once I got to LBC, I completed a 12 week parasite cleanse and found a job at a wellness clinic. There we did a lot of COVID testing, as well as IV/injection Vitamin therapy. After that clinic closed in March, 2023, I started to offer sound baths more often, as I slowly began to put my sound bath instruments together. A local store allowed me to use their space to offer private and group sound baths, and I slowly started to find my groove as a sound bath facilitator. In August, 2023, I found the current IV therapy company I’m currently working for I’m happy to say I’ve never been happier. My nervous system has never been more calm, and I’m collaborating with amazing entrepreneurs in my community to promote overall wellness; mind, body, and spirit.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: LiliWavesLBC

Image Credits

Main photo (Dripp IV Therapy) – profile page