From Silicon Valley Success To Chronic Pain Recovery + Resiliency with Nancy Deyo (Part 1)

You can muscle through a deadline, a setback, even a broken heart, but what happens when you try to muscle through your own body? We sit down with Nancy Deo, a former Silicon Valley CEO and Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute fellow, whose search for redemption after a devastating business loss led her to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with an already injured back. What followed was a collapse at 16,000 feet, a terrifying descent off the mountain, and the kind of pain that rewrites your entire life story.

Nancy takes us inside the high performance culture that trained her to endure at all costs, and the moment she realised that the same “discipline and control” that once defined her success was no longer serving her. We talk about the hidden emotional toll of chronic pain, the mind-bending experience of being told “you’re fine” while your body insists otherwise, and how misdiagnosis can erode self-trust. She shares the medical reality too: missed fractures, major spine surgery, and the long recovery that refused to move in a straight line.

We also get honest about opioid dependence, how relief can quickly turn into “taking them so you don’t feel worse,” and why pain can create a vicious cycle of fear and anxiety. Nancy’s story ultimately challenges the most common resilience myth: that strength is always pushing harder. 

The Quiet Gift: A Journey of Self Worth and Resilience is now available for download as an audible.  Check it out!

Transcript

Why We All Get Depleted

SPEAKER_00 0:06

All of us reach a point in time where we are depleted and need to somehow find a way to reignite the fire within. But how do we spark that flame? Welcome to Reignite Resilience, where we will venture into the heart of the human spirit. We'll discuss the art of reigniting our passion and strategies to stoke our enthusiasm. And now here are your hosts, Natalie Davis and Pamela Cass.

Weather Banter And A Fire Alarm

SPEAKER_04 0:41

Welcome back to another episode of the Reignite Resilience Podcast. I am your co-host, Natalie Davis, and I'm so excited to be back with all of you today. And of course, joining us is your co-host Pam Cass. Hello, Pam. How are you?

SPEAKER_02 0:54

I am fantastic. It's 85 degrees. It's like warm. Warm is in the air. Summer's in the air, I feel like, but then we're gonna get snow, I think, on Monday.

SPEAKER_04 1:02

So that's what I've heard. I don't watch it. This is the time of year that I really don't watch it. And then I I feel like I should because I get surprised most frequently during this time of year. I usually just watch it in the winters just to see if we can travel. But you know what? Here we are.

SPEAKER_02 1:17

Here we are. It's funny. So I was this funny story. So I was in Vail last week to of course the one day it snows this year is the day that I have to drive up to Vail and then the next day drive back in the snow. And I had just spoken, and of course, I wanted to get out of my suit and into like proper like attire for driving clothes 70 in the snow if something happens. So I go into the bathroom because I had to check out my room. I have my suitcase open on the floor. I have no clothes on. I get my leggings and I have my Doc Martin like boots you have to lace up and I'm topless and the fire alarm goes off. It's like oh my gosh. I know. And I'm just like, wait, what? I'm like, this is this is a joke, right? This is a joke. Oh my shirt on. I was like, thank goodness I have shoes on. So I was a bit of a hot mess trying to like shove all my stuff.

SPEAKER_04 2:12

Shove everything back in the luggage, and you're doing exactly what they tell you not to do. Don't worry about your belongings. Just get out of the building. You're like, nope, you can't do that.

SPEAKER_02 2:19

No, you're gonna leave in my brand new suit I had just bought with you the week before. And so until then I'm like feverishly running out into the lobby area, and the bartenders are mixing drinks and people are sitting around the fireplace just drinking their cup. I'm like, well, apparently nobody is concerned about the fact that there's fire trucks out front and there's like just another day in the life.

SPEAKER_04 2:44

Exactly. No one's alarmed. No one's alarmed. I've had that happen a couple of times. There was one time that it happened, like in the middle of the night, and I just sent a text message to the people that I was traveling with. I said, Is this real? Or are we just staying in our rooms? We all decided to just stay in our rooms. And so we didn't. Who are those people?

SPEAKER_02 3:02

Where do you like, oh, there were all these people that didn't evacuate and they didn't make it out?

SPEAKER_04 3:06

It's they questioned, they're like, Why were there people still in the hotel if the alarms go off?

unknown 3:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:11

We weren't sure if it was real or not. Why would an alarm go off in a hotel?

SPEAKER_04 3:16

Exactly. Exactly. Oh my

Meet Nancy Deo

SPEAKER_04 3:19

gosh. Well, I am excited about our episode. We have a special guest that's joining us. Pam, I'm gonna turn it over to you.

SPEAKER_02 3:26

Tell our listeners who's joining us today. Absolutely. Super excited about this. So today we have Nancy Deo. She is a former Silicon Valley CEO and Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute fellow who brings a rare perspective to conversations about chronic pain, resilience, and the cost of high performance culture. After a medical crisis on Mount Kilimajaro led to a 15-year journey of misdiagnosis, persistent pain, opio dependency, and identity collapse. She began to question the very strategies that had once defined her success: discipline, endurance, and pushing through. Welcome, Nancy. We are so honored to have you with us today. And I want to hear all of the story, especially the Mount Kilimajaro, but kind of start with what got you to that space in your life. You know, you're a CEO and Natalie and I have both in leadership positions, so we have both been in those spaces. So kind of share with us that story.

SPEAKER_03 4:29

Thanks, Pam. Thanks, Natalie. Really good to be here with both of

A Childhood Built On Outlasting

SPEAKER_03 4:33

you. I think I'm gonna start just briefly to tell you why I was the way I was. I grew up in this genius family with a sister and a father who were just beyond brilliant. And I was a smart kid, but the only way I could keep up was to work harder, outlast everybody, push harder, persevere, endure. And that was the way that I could be on par with my dad and my sister. And that carried me through to adulthood where I became extremely career-driven, and success was measured on funds raised and performance metrics and everything that required striving, performance, achievement, pushing through. And that was very much who I was when I was in Silicon Valley, which, as you know and can your listeners can imagine, is a deeply competitive, hard-driving culture. So there I was. I had this company that was focused on getting adolescent girls to put their hands on computers so they would grow up and be competitive with boys who were playing video games at the time. And I was very passionate about this, and I was working like a maniac and really trying to just persevere and strive to make that company successful.

Failure In Silicon Valley And Redemption

SPEAKER_03 6:01

Cut to the chase, the company started to run out of money, and I had to sell it to an arch rival, which was Mattel, the toy company and makers of Barbie. And that was the most devastating thing in my professional life. It was actually crushing. And I was such a failure, and it was palpable, like my first failure, really ever. And so as I got shaken to the core, I thought to myself, I have to do something big. I have to redeem myself somehow. And I just didn't have the constitution and energy to go back at it and start another company. And I thought, I was always an athlete as a kid. I'm gonna go climb one of the highest mountains in the world. And this is gonna show that I can conquer and I can still succeed and I can still push. You're nodding at this story. Just like I'm probably not alone in this.

SPEAKER_04 7:05

Absolutely. It's like, what else? Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 7:08

You know what? I so I went to Kilimanjaro for redemption to prove I could still succeed at something. I wanted to prove this to myself and to my husband and all my peers out there and to Silicon Valley and everybody else in the world that knew I had failed. I really had no business climbing that mountain because my back was already strained and somehow injured before I even started. But the only thing that I knew was how to compartmentalize pain and push. And I had trained for this, I was ready for this, I was gonna make this happen just like I had tried to make my company happen. And as I went up the mountain, things got worse and worse and worse with both the altitude and lack of oxygen, but more importantly, from the pain that I was experiencing in my back that led me to give up my pack on the first day and stop sitting down for meals by the second and third. The team strapped on a duct tape and an inflatable pillow to

Kilimanjaro Collapse And The Descent

SPEAKER_03 8:09

make a back brace for me, and I still went up. And at this point, I'm just going based on everything I know how to do: discipline, control, pushing. So there I am, I'm at 16,000 feet on the roof of Africa. I'm 41 years old. I'm alone because my husband is summiting and I'm going down with a porter, and I have collapsed, and I cannot move my legs. And I think to myself, they feel like they're disconnected from my body. And when I try to move, it feels like somebody's driving a steel rod through my spine. And I honestly had two thoughts. I thought, number one, maybe I'm bleeding out. I mean, maybe I am dying and I'm gonna end up with my name on a plaque like the other climbers that didn't make it down. And the more logical side of me had this thought that my whole life has been about pushing harder. And that's what I did on this mountain, and it is not serving me. And something in me should have shifted, but as you'll hear when we keep talking to each other, it didn't. And when pushing through stops working, it challenges everything about who you are, and I wasn't ready to be challenged in that way. But it took me 15 years to learn that resilience wasn't about pushing harder, it was about finding a different way to live. So I'm just gonna stop there with that's the be that was the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Wow. So you you had that moment where you were thinking that, okay, well, maybe I need to do things differently, but then you just nope, just just kept going through because it was your identity. You had had this identity of pushing, just pushing, pushing, pushing. And so you weren't ready for that shift yet.

SPEAKER_03 10:07

I think that losing your identity is one of the scariest things that can happen because you just don't understand yourself anymore. Plus, these deeply ingrained habits that have been there since childhood and into your adulthood, those are really hard to reform or they're really hard to break. And I just wasn't ready.

SPEAKER_04 10:29

And oftentimes we just chalk it up to that's just who I am, right? That's just part of me. It's who I am, it's how I show up. This is what you get. Not realizing that it stems from a level of competition that you had to be seen, to have a voice, to show that you are worthy, right? Like the rest of your genius family, right? You're you I belong here. Yeah. Nancy, what I think is so interesting, like as you talk about your identity being connected, you know, to this business and this idea that you created, is still coming out on the other side, is that you had a deal with Mattel, which I think a lot of people will build and grow things just for that opportunity. And that was not the space that you were in and seeing it as an opportunity. It was more of a loss. It was like a death of part of you.

SPEAKER_03 11:15

Yes, it was. It was. I mean, honestly, at the time we were so focused on creating something for girls that felt really real and authentic. And we kind of quietly prided ourselves on being the anti-Barbie, and then here I am selling the business to them so that they can give her some kind of crazy makeover, you know, my main character and God knows what will happen to her. But you're right, Natalie. I think that a lot of people would view that not as an abject failure, which is how I viewed it.

SPEAKER_04 11:46

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

Because that was your identity as well. Oh, yes.

unknown 11:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 11:52

So, Nancy, here you are making your, well, not you making your way back down, but being carried down. And you're thinking, you have no idea what's going on. If you're bleeding out, what's happening into your body, knowing that you're in excruciating pain. That's the only thing that you know to be true. Talk to us a little bit about that journey because there's a mindset that is important for you not to give up on the way back down as your husband summoning.

SPEAKER_03 12:17

Absolutely. You know, there's a little story I want to share about the descent. There were two porters with me, and because I literally couldn't walk, I just was in so much pain that my legs weren't working. And so they piggybacked me down the mountain. And what you're gonna hear is it turned out I had basically broken my back, but I didn't know it at the time. And so they're literally running down the mountain with me, and I'm bouncing and slamming against them. And I mean, it was so excruciating. And I we met up finally with the rest of the team who had summited. And so I met up with my husband who was stunned at my condition and just, you know, had no idea what could have happened because when he saw me last, I was still walking. I hadn't collapsed. I went the rest of the way down the mountain being piggybacked by these two strong guys taking turns with me. And the insane thing is because of who I was at the time and how much that quote success was important to me. When I got to the end gate, there's two, there's a stone gate at the end of the trail that we were on on Kilmanjaro. And I said to them, you guys have to put me down. I have to walk through that gate, which is ridiculous. I'm so embarrassed now that I did that. It's so crazy. So they put me down. I'm so weak that they've got their hands around my, you know, my shoulders, and they're basically almost dragging me across that gate so that I can be victorious. And there's a photo that my husband had taken that I saw years later of me just presenting like excited with these strong guys around me at the end of the gate, like I had somehow made it. And I think the things that we do to present ourselves to the world and to find a way to make the story work is ridiculous. So that was my descent. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:26

Wow. So you had you had just gone through having to sell your business and you felt like everyone was gonna see you as a failure. So you're like, all right, I'm going and climbing Mount Kilimadara and to show people that I still can do this, and then you end up not being able to do it because you're back, but you were gonna show them at the end that you did it by crossing that that gate. I can at least walk through the gate. Yeah, I can at least walk through the gate. Look at me with my broken back. But but you didn't even know that you had a broken back. And yeah, so tell us that moment you cross that gate.

SPEAKER_03 15:02

I cross the gate. It's funny. I think, like so many of us who have big goals and who strive for the impossible, the minute you achieve it, it's not very meaningful anymore. Yes. Exactly. It's like, okay, now what?

SPEAKER_04 15:17

It's so interesting you say that, Nancy, because I was thinking, surely you feel that sense of accomplishment just for a moment. It's I did it. Maybe a very brief moment.

SPEAKER_03 15:33

Great word. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 15:35

Wow. And so directly to the hospital from that moment.

Misdiagnosis And Finally A Real Answer

SPEAKER_03 15:39

We basically got to the hospital in Kenya, Nairobi. So we had we had to wait until the next day and we flew out. And the crazy thing is, I was hospitalized in Nairobi. The doctor took an MRI and some x-rays and was delighted to tell me that I was basically gonna be fine. I just needed some bed rest. And so I thought, oh, my husband, I thought, thank God, this is like such a relief. I thought something was really wrong. We three weeks later, I was not any better. I was lying down all the time. We got ourselves to London, where my father, who was a doctor, had a colleague who was an orthopedist who looked at the films and said, You're gonna be fine. You know, you need some physical therapy. And I did my damnedest. And I finally came home in desperation because I really wasn't any better. I was worse if anything, just having so much difficulty, and I was hospitalized for the pain. And I I just knew my body, and I knew something was wrong. And I still remember this moment. I'm lying in the hospital bed, my husband's next to me, I'm so weak, it's like I'm sinking into the mattress, and there's a commode on the other side of the bed because I can't make it to the bathroom. And my hometown doc walks in and says, I have really good news for you. You are gonna be fine. And I just I felt like my suffering was being discounted or disbelieved or something. Because when you're told that nothing's wrong over and over and you know something is, there's this split, and you start to, well, I started to question myself. I thought, is this real? Is this in my head? You just have this break between what your body's telling you and your instincts are telling you. And so it's it's not just the pain that's so devastating, it's like losing that trust and wondering like, am I crazy? Am I confused? What's going on? You know, the end of the story is that another doctor that, again, somebody that my dad found for me in San Francisco, did some more sophisticated testing as the technology is always improving and was able to tell me that there were some fractures that had been missed on the MRI and that the disc needed to be replaced. And I basically needed a fusion where they bolt your spine together with titanium rods and let the bone regrow. So that was what finally happened. But by the time that happened, it was six months later, and I was traveling to doctor's appointments by ambulance because I was in so much pain I couldn't even lie in the back of the seat of the car. I mean, I was really broken and the chronic pain had consumed me. So six months you were doing. Yeah. I'm just thinking about you flying on the plane with a broken back and oh my lord, and this is, you know, we were not flying business

Opioids And The Fear Cycle

SPEAKER_03 18:34

or first class, we were flying coach, and I was, you know, honestly flipping out. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 18:41

So you learned to manage the pain. And I know the opiates, you said was that where it became dependency was on that pain during the You know, the c yes, and the crazy thing is after I was carried down the mountain, there was a really famous mountaineer at the time.

SPEAKER_03 19:00

His name was David Brashears, and he was making an IMAX movie on Kilmanjaro at the same time we were there. And my husband ran into him randomly on the path of this hotel the night before we flew to the hospital in Nairobi, and he gave us a handful of Vicodin, which is an opiate. And I was like, oh, thank God, you know, thank you. I couldn't don't know how I could get on that plane without it. But little did I know that that was just the beginning. Yeah. Because, you know, the body can get so dependent so quickly, and you get that sense of relief, and it it dulls the pain a bit. And soon you're not just taking them to feel better, but you're taking them so you don't feel worse. And by the time I was operated on six months later, I was on so much oxycontin that it was, I think the the my medical team was worried about me and about how successful the surgery would be because of how much pain I was in before they operated. But we all were hopeful and optimistic that once they fixed structurally what was wrong with me, that the pain would start to uh yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:10

Well, and Nancy, I feel that there's the part of the brain that was also kind of experiencing that relief, right? Because that's what's what's helping is the message that goes to the brain that we're no longer, as you mentioned, compartmentalizing the pain that I'm feeling in my body. It's like, yeah, it's achy, there's some pain there, let's put it to the side. It's fine. I'm still gonna do this climb. It's wonderful. We can push through. And as soon as you're able to introduce some of the outside relief for that, and your brain can stop focusing the attention on compartmentalizing or minimizing what you feel as pain, or at least the degree of pain that you were feeling through. And that's how medications work. That right? Like that's that's exactly what happens, is that your your body now does not have to send all of the resources to fight that, to heal that, or thinking that it has to.

SPEAKER_03 20:59

And I think for those of us who are good at compartmentalizing our pain, when you're not doing that and you feel it in full force, it can be really overwhelming. So I was I was just frankly overwhelmed by it. And it takes an emotional and mental toll too. I mean, the fear and anxiety that pain produces in our minds and in our bodies, you know, the moment is so horrible, and then you're even more terrified about the next moment. So it's just a vicious cycle that keeps on cycling.

SPEAKER_04 21:34

Six months is quite some time to wait to actually get an actual diagnosis and go through surgery. Where are you in terms of your journey with yourself, right? Because it this all started with this discovery of well, now what? What's next? And outside of healing your body mentally, where are you? Uh, professional journey and what you're seeking to find. What does that look like during that? Six month period.

Identity Loss And Recovery Setbacks

SPEAKER_03 22:01

Well, as you can imagine, this did a number on my identity as we started to discuss, because I always had this mental image of who I was in that role, if you will, primary role of being a, you know, a Silicon Valley company head. And, you know, I'd be wearing this dark blue suit and pumps, and I'd be like running through the airport with my briefcase slung over my shoulder and you know, going to be like. And my hair's just flat against my head, and the pillowcase is soiled with sweat. And, you know, you do not have any idea who you are. And I had no idea really like how to rebuild that. How to figure out well, more than anything, I wanted to get back to who I was. That's what I wanted. Just give me my old life back. Just do whatever it takes. I would do whatever it took. My doctors were doing their best to try to get me to a place where I could reclaim myself.

SPEAKER_02 23:23

Okay, so you had had this surgery and you were hoping that you could get back to the CEO self, that high-powered person that was running through the airports with the heels and the briefcase.

SPEAKER_03 23:36

Absolutely. I mean, I think for a lot of us that go through loss or an illness or something, we just want to be who we were. You know, I identified in that role as that. I mean, as a wife, it also as a daughter, as a sister. But suddenly I was chronic pain patient, like full stop, period. That's it. And that was so confusing and disjointing. You it just dismantled everything that you believed in. So you got through the surgery.

SPEAKER_02 24:08

What did that recovery look like? And what did you end up deciding was the true identity you wanted to now have after this experience?

SPEAKER_03 24:20

Well, you know, you hope and you think that recovery is going to be this straight line that goes upward into the right. And you're smiling because that's ridiculous, and it doesn't happen. And I'm sure all your listeners know that, you know, no matter how resilient they are, it doesn't happen either. But that's what I hoped for, and that's what we set out to achieve, my husband and I. And um, my recovery was peppered by setback after setback after setback, where I would somehow, even unconsciously, just push too hard, whether it was sitting too long, because my sitting was so limited, I had to do it on a timer on a cell phone. Or maybe I would walk half a block too far in my physical therapy. But sometimes it was so random. You know, I would do an aggressive glute squeeze and I'd be thrown back for weeks. I mean, just something horrible and crazy. So I never knew how and when it was going to happen, but I would was in a cycle of perpetual pushing, crashing, being completely disabled and then starting over again.

Mayo Clinic Detox And Closing Ask

SPEAKER_03 25:32

So the recovery was such a non-starter that five years later, in desperation, just with this happening over and over and over, I went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota because they had a pain rehabilitation and drug detox program. And I was so grateful that they would take me as a chronic pain patient and somebody who had a long-term dependence on opioids. And it was a three-week program that basically, ironically, kind of pushed and shoved you through at a really fast rate because in week one, the drugs come out from under you and the withdrawal, we can talk about that later if you want, but it's really frightening. And then in weeks two and three, I went from lying on the floor of the conference room in the pain rehabilitation center to starting to sit. I would force myself to sit longer than I was able and force myself to do some activities of daily living, like vacuum, you know, a rug or mop the floor or whatever it was. No sooner did that happen than I came home and I crashed the worst crash ever.

SPEAKER_00 26:44

Thank you for joining us today on the Reignite Resilience podcast. We hope you had some aha moments and learned a few new real-life ideas to fuel the flames of passion. Please subscribe on your favorite streaming platform, like or download your favorite episodes, and of course, share with your friends and family. We look forward to seeing you again next time on Reignite Resilience.