Today we’d like to introduce you to Courtney Ekhator.
Hi Courtney, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My story starts in Benin City, Nigeria. I was 17 years old, already in my second year of medical school, when my sister and I left everything we knew to join our father in the United States. It was terrifying. But I came with one thing already decided — I was going to build something.
My first job in America paid $9.25 an hour as a CNA at a nursing home. That job did something I didn’t expect — it opened a door to the world of psychiatry. Working alongside patients at their most vulnerable, I saw firsthand how deeply mental health shapes every other part of a person’s life. It planted a seed that never left me.
I would get off a night shift at 6am, go straight to class until 2pm, study, sleep briefly, and go back to work. I had no weekends. No birthday parties. No breaks. What I had was a goal I could see clearly even when everything around me was uncertain.
There were hard moments. I failed a pathophysiology course in nursing school and felt the kind of doom that makes you question everything. I took two months, regrouped, went back and made an A. I took a pay cut to work in a Level 1 trauma center just to position myself for a critical care nursing role after graduation. Every move was intentional, even when it hurt.
Then came CRNA school — one of the most demanding programs in healthcare. In the middle of it, I got married and became pregnant. What made that moment even more profound is that I have PCOS — so while the timing wasn’t what I had planned, that baby was nothing short of a blessing we didn’t know we were about to receive. I developed severe preeclampsia, ended up in the ICU, delivered by C-section, and was told to take a year off. I was back in school one week later. I wasn’t being reckless — I simply knew who I was and what I was building.
I graduated with my Doctorate in Nursing Practice and today practice as a CRNA. And in May 2026, I will add another credential to that story — graduating with my Master’s as a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner. That seed planted during those early CNA shifts at a nursing home grew into a full clinical calling. Anesthesia and psychiatry are not as separate as people think — both live at the intersection of the brain, the body, and what it means to be human.
But the story doesn’t stop at the clinical work — it’s really where the building began.
I am the co-founder of Brainstruct, an educational gaming platform designed to eliminate the early childhood learning gap. Brainstruct turns learning into an adventure for children ages 2 to 8 — blending science-backed curriculum with interactive games that make colors, letters, numbers, and shapes genuinely fun to master. It was born from my clinical understanding of brain development, my psychiatric training, and my deep belief that what happens in a child’s earliest years shapes everything that follows.
I also co-founded Dolorvia, an AI-powered career management platform built specifically for CRNAs, anesthesiologists, and student nurse anesthetists. Dolorvia reads employment contracts in under 60 seconds, flags risks like non-compete clauses and malpractice gaps, tracks credentials and licenses across all 50 states, and gives anesthesia providers the kind of career intelligence that used to require a lawyer and a spreadsheet. I built it because I lived the problem — navigating contracts, managing credentials, and making high-stakes career decisions without the right tools. I didn’t want the next generation of providers to do the same.
And alongside all of this, I run Life Beneath Scrubs — a platform and growing women’s community built on one simple belief: every woman has a next chapter waiting, and she doesn’t need to feel ready to go get it. I am building Beneath the Scrubs as a network where women hold hands, tell the truth, and remind each other that the life they want is still possible — no matter where they are starting from.
I went from $9.25 an hour to a doctorate, a master’s in psychiatric nursing, two tech companies, and a movement. But what I want people to take from my story isn’t the titles or the companies. It’s the fact that I was never the most resourced person in the room. I was just the one who refused to stop.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Not even close. But the struggles I want to talk about are not the ones people expect.
The hardest battles were never the long shifts or the difficult coursework. Those were hard, yes — but they were visible. You can push through something you can see. The battles that nearly broke me were the ones happening inside.
Imposter syndrome is real, and it is particularly loud when you are a Black immigrant woman walking into rooms — operating rooms, boardrooms, academic institutions — that were not built with you in mind. There were moments in my career where I sat at a table and wondered if I truly belonged there, not because I lacked the credentials, but because nothing in the room reflected me. Nobody looked like me. Nobody had come from where I came from. And the voice that asks *are you sure you’re supposed to be here* does not care how many degrees you have.
Entrepreneurship introduced a completely different kind of struggle — one I was not prepared for. Building Brainstruct and Dolorvia while practicing clinically and completing a master’s in psychiatric nursing means that on any given day I am a CRNA, a CEO, a student, a wife, and a mother. The question I wrestle with most is not whether I can do all of it. I know I can. The question is whether the version of me showing up for each of those roles is truly enough. That guilt — the particular guilt of an ambitious woman who loves her family deeply — is something we do not talk about honestly enough.
And then there is the cost that ambition extracts from your personal life that nobody puts on a vision board. The friendships that quietly faded because I was never available. The moments with my husband and my child that I had to be fully present for while my mind was somewhere else entirely. The version of myself I had to set aside temporarily to become the version standing here today. I do not regret any of it — but I also will not pretend it was free.
The smoothest thing about my road has been my sense of direction. Even when everything around me was chaotic, I always knew which way I was going. That clarity has been the only thing that made the rest survivable.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
On any given day, I might sedate a patient for surgery in the morning, review a product roadmap for Dolorvia by afternoon, and answer questions from a young woman trying to figure out how to get into nursing school by evening. That is not an exaggeration. That is Tuesday.
People ask how I hold it all together and I think the honest answer is that I don’t experience it as separate things to hold. The clinical work informs the businesses. The businesses are fed by the clinical work. My psychiatric training shows up in how I lead teams, how I talk to women in my community, how I think about what children need from a learning platform. Everything bleeds into everything else — and that is not chaos, that is just how my brain is wired.
What most people don’t realize about anesthesia is how much it is a discipline of presence. When a patient is on your table, there is no multitasking, no divided attention, no good enough. You are completely and utterly there. That standard has shaped every other professional role I occupy. I bring that same quality of attention to building Brainstruct, to designing Dolorvia, to showing up for the women in the Beneath the Scrubs community. The OR taught me what full commitment actually looks like — and I cannot unknow that.
The psychiatric training added a different layer entirely. It taught me to ask not just what is happening, but why. Why does this child struggle to engage with learning? Why does this provider keep making the same career mistake? Why does this woman keep standing at the edge of her own potential without jumping? Those are psychiatric questions as much as they are business and community questions. My training gave me a framework for human behavior that I use every single day — in rooms that have nothing to do with a clinic.
What I love most about my professional life is that it has refused to be ordinary. It has demanded that I keep growing, keep building, keep showing up as more than one thing at a time. Some days that is exhilarating. Some days it is a lot. But I would not trade the complexity for a simpler path — because the complexity is exactly where the impact lives.
What was your favorite childhood memory?
Cooking. Without question.
I have loved being in a kitchen for as long as I can remember. Growing up in Benin City, I was the child who would disappear into the kitchen and emerge with something she had invented — at ten years old I was already naming my concoctions and forcing the entire household to sit down and taste them whether they wanted to or not. Nobody got to say no. That was not optional.
By the time I got to university in Nigeria, my friends knew exactly where to find me and exactly why. My jollof rice had a reputation before I did. I remember people eagerly waiting for it like it was an event — and honestly, it was.
What I understand now that I didn’t then is that cooking was always an expression of the same thing that drives everything else I do — the desire to create something from nothing and share it with the people I love. The kitchen was my first laboratory. My first startup, really.
I haven’t ruled out doing something with it someday. Life is long and I have learned never to say never. For now the operating room and the boardroom keep me busy — but the kitchen is always waiting.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://lifebeneathscrubs.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lifebeneathscrubs/
- Other: https://brainstruct.com
Image Credits
I plan to upload about two more photos and will give edits then.. Thank you
