Living With Autoimmune Disease and Motherhood: Katie Cleary’s Story
Autoimmune disease and motherhood collide in ways most people never hear about, because so much of it is invisible. Katie Cleary, founder of Autoimmune Mom, has lived with autoimmune thyroid disease for seventeen years, diagnosed shortly after her second pregnancy. On this episode of the Rebellious Times Podcast, she talks with Chris Januszewski about what it actually takes to keep building a career and raising a family while managing a condition that never fully goes away.
Chris came to this conversation from a few different angles: the pressure women and mothers carry trying to balance work and family, the fact that autoimmune disease in women stays chronically underfunded and under-researched, and his own experience as a husband learning to actually show up for his wife through pregnancy, postpartum, and the medical issues that followed each one.
From Diagnosis to Advocacy: Katie’s Own Story
Katie grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, went west for undergrad, and came to Austin for her MBA at UT’s McCombs School. Her autoimmune symptoms started during pregnancy but weren’t diagnosed until after her second child was born. At the time, she felt completely alone. Reddit’s health communities barely existed yet, and the Facebook groups that did exist were mostly people venting rather than finding real support. That gap is what led her to found Autoimmune Mom: a place for moms to tell their own stories and find people who actually understood what they were going through.
What Autoimmune Disease Actually Is
Autoimmune conditions happen when the immune system mistakes part of the body for an outside threat and attacks it. There are around a hundred different autoimmune conditions, they tend to run in families (though not always the same condition in each person), and Katie points to both a genetic component and an environmental one, including links to adverse childhood experiences. Roughly 80% of autoimmune cases show up in women, most often at puberty, pregnancy, or menopause, which points to a hormonal connection research hasn’t fully explained yet. Most of it is invisible: someone can look completely fine while running on the kind of fatigue that resembles first-trimester pregnancy exhaustion, every day.
The Impact on Motherhood: “Don’t Compete With Other Moms”
Autoimmune disease and motherhood rarely get discussed together, but Katie’s biggest piece of advice comes from living at that intersection: stop measuring yourself against mothers who aren’t managing a chronic condition. She describes pacing using the “spoon theory”: you have a limited number of spoons each day, and if you spend past your limit, you pay for it days later in a flare. Resetting expectations, whether that’s how often dinner includes a full rotation of vegetables or how much sleep you can realistically expect, matters more than pushing through. Finding other moms who understand, whether in person or online, is what made the difference for her.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
04:48 Understanding Autoimmune Diseases
11:55 The Impact of Autoimmune Diseases on Motherhood
18:03 Navigating Diagnosis and Treatment
24:04 Community Support and Resources
29:11 Conclusion and Future Outlook
Getting Diagnosed and Building the Right Care Team
Autoimmune diagnosis can take up to eight years, partly because women are so often dismissed by the medical system. Katie’s advice: start journaling symptoms early, on paper or through apps like Folia Health, so there’s a clear trend line to bring to a doctor. If a doctor isn’t listening, find another one, and telehealth has made that far more accessible than it used to be. She also walks through the real decision every patient with a chronic condition faces: concierge care, a primary-care-plus-specialist approach, or functional/integrative medicine, and points out that chasing every possible treatment at once can create more noise than progress.
Why Katie Built Autoimmune Mom, and What She Trusts (and Doesn’t) From AI
Autoimmune Mom is a storytelling site built on the idea that a shared burden is a lighter one. It’s still actively looking for new stories, and Katie herself invites listeners to reach out if they want to contribute one. On AI in healthcare, she’s clear-eyed: she doesn’t trust general models like Claude or ChatGPT for medical questions, but uses a free tool called Insightful Med that cites real research and doesn’t hallucinate sources. Through her consulting firm, Camino Real Ventures, she now works with healthcare and chronic-condition startups on the same problem from the business side: helping people find care and get diagnosed faster.
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