Katherine Pray

A new diagnosis, a body that no longer cooperates, or a calendar quietly taken over by medical appointments can leave you anxious, exhausted, and not quite like yourself — and often everyone around you attends to the medical side while the emotional weight goes unspoken. That part deserves care too, and you do not have to carry it by yourself. I am Katherine, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Illinois with 17 years of experience, most of it spent inside hospitals and collaborative care clinics alongside people managing chronic illness, serious physical health conditions, diabetes, and the anxiety and grief that tend to travel with them. I work with adults across Illinois who are living with a medical condition, adjusting to a hard diagnosis, or grieving a loss, and my job is to make sure the emotional part of your health gets the same attention as everything else.

Sessions with me tend to feel practical and unhurried. We start with whatever is actually hardest this week — the appointment you are dreading, the conversation you cannot have with your family, the low mood that has crept in since your diagnosis — and work outward from there. Together we may separate the worry that is useful from the worry that is only noise, build coping skills that hold up on a bad day, name the depression and sadness that so often show up alongside a long illness, and find language for the conversations you need to have with the people who love you. Because most of my career has been in medical settings, I am steady in the harder territory as well: caregiver strain and family issues, anticipatory grief, and end of life care, including walking with people and their families through terminal illness. I move at your pace, I ask whether what we are doing is actually helping, and I would rather change the plan than push you through something that is not working.

The first couple of sessions are mostly about understanding you: what brought you here now, your medical and personal history, what you have already tried, and — just as importantly — what you are already doing well. There is no expectation that you share everything at once. From there we set goals in plain language, and I will tell you honestly what I think we can work on together. Over time the work tends to look like steadier days, coping skills that hold when your health does not, more confidence advocating for yourself with doctors and with family, and a clearer sense of who you are apart from your diagnosis. Some weeks we will problem-solve something concrete; other weeks we will simply make room for how heavy this is. Both count. When you are ready, you can use Headway to find a time that works for you and take the next step toward getting started.