‘The best you can for your community’: How one Filipina woman made her way to the Roaring Fork Valley

As Kristine Gatdula entered The Little Nell on Sunday, she was greeted by Stanley, a fellow gym mate, at the place where she worked almost 10 years before.

A full circle moment, Gatdula would note later. She seemed to be having a lot of those these days.

Some of Gatdula’s early experiences before she came to the valley were in the hospitality industry in high school and college.

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Possessing a passion for snowboarding, she always wanted to live in a mountain ski town for a season, so she decided to apply to several ski resorts, including in Vail and Breckenridge, to work in their restaurants.

On her 30th birthday, she interviewed with The Little Nell and got the job in the hotel’s restaurant.

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“I felt a connection with them, like they made me feel at home,” Gatdula said with a smile, one that she flashed easily and often. “So, I ended up moving here because of that, and until this day, those people are still my friends. I didn’t ever expect that I’d stay here 10 years later.”

Gatdula will celebrate a decade in the valley in November. But before she became an Aspenite, she was born in Hawaii. Her parents immigrated 5,000 miles from the Philippines to America, when her dad joined the Navy. 

They were stationed in Honolulu, where Gatdula was born, until she was in middle school. They then moved 2,500 miles to Las Vegas, where she finished high school. After graduating, Gatdula moved almost 400 miles to California to attend the University of San Diego to study biology.

While there, her cousin introduced her to surfing and snowboarding, and this is where her passion for the latter came from.

But despite her passion for snowboarding, she did not feel the same passion for dentistry after she graduated from dental hygiene school.

“My mom was in the dental field growing up, and I was really into it. I thought I saw myself going into healthcare,” Gatdula said, her reflection in one of The Little Nell’s windows melding with the reflection of Aspen Mountain and its trees. “Then when I went to finish dental hygiene school, I graduated, got into the workforce, I realized this isn’t what I was looking for as a healthcare provider.”

In line with her Filipino culture, Gatdula felt it was natural to go into healthcare. She wanted to help people.

“I’m a retired janitor, and I actually went to school for this,” she said during her storytelling performance at Writ Large’s performing arts series. “The job that has us cleaning the most smelly and the most foul places. I used to clean tiny areas that were overused and under maintained. I didn’t know I was a janitor until I started working in dental offices. I am a registered dental hygienist, aka mouth janitor.”

Gatdula quickly found that all she was doing was monotonous, back breaking, eight-hour-long work days. And the worst part of all, Gatdula said, was that at the end of the month the production numbers in teeth cleanings became more important than the quality of care she was giving and the patient in her chair.

“My neck would hurt. My back would hurt,” she said. “I would even have to sleep on my hands because they would go numb at night.”

At a loss for what to do, Gatdula remembered a conversation she had with her dad.

“My dad told me early on in life to fill my days with doing good things so I could sleep well at night,” she said. “Luckily, early on in my career I found yoga. I was infatuated with my yoga teachers because they actually made me feel better.”

Her instructors taught her about alignment, nasal breathing and staying in the present moment; these would be the greatest gifts of her life. She spent the next five years diving deep into her practice, including leaving her job as a dental hygienist to train to become a yoga teacher. She wanted to share these gifts to the world, so she began traveling the world to study under the best teachers.

“I was in my 20s, and I was living my best, my healthiest life,” Gatdula said. “That’s until April 6, 2012.”

That day, Gatdula went to a lab due to prolonged bleeding, shortness of breath, rapid heart rate and lightheadedness. A few hours after her labs were finished, her phone rang. It was a call from the lab telling her to go to the emergency room immediately.

Her blood levels were critically low.

She spent the next three days in the ICU being filled back up with four bags of blood. The concern with losing this much blood is enough oxygen getting to the brain and vital organs.  

“And come to find out I had these blood-sucking vampires in my uterus called fibroids,” Gatdula said. 

Her doctor was shocked that she was still alive. He also said that whatever she had been doing at the time had saved her life.

Coincidentally one could say, although Gatdula does not believe in those, she was training for yoga competitions at this time. Everything she did revolved around preparing for these, from what she ate, to the amount of water she drank, to spending up to five hours in a hot room for hot yoga.

Yoga helps to increase circulation in the body, as well as improve oxygen uptake, Gatdula said. Combined with being in the hot room, it made her breathing more efficient, which made up for the lack of hemoglobin, which is the carrier of oxygen in red blood cells.

After finding out about the fibroids in her uterus, she spent the next couple of months preparing for surgery to get them removed.

“And this would give me the next greatest gift, which was pause,” Gatdula said. “It allowed me to sit back and reflect on where my life was at then. And I realize I’ve been so hyperfocused on yoga and training that I had let go of all the other things that made me feel alive.”

Once again, out of balance and at a loss, she woke up from her fourth surgery where she found out her doctor had removed 62 fibroids from her uterus.

“I groggily wake up from anesthesia, and I say, ‘No, no … Dr. Moore quoted me 26 fibroids,'” Gatdula said. 

Sixty-two fibroids were among the most fibroids Moore had ever removed from a young woman’s uterus in his 40-year career.

Following the two years since her diagnosis and the four surgeries she underwent, this takes us back to Gatdula getting the job at The Little Nell and moving to the valley in 2014. 

Before moving, she had never been to Colorado before. Her friend, who had recently rebuilt her Airstream, helped her move from Las Vegas to Snowmass.

“My first time coming here, I remember driving into the valley, and I saw Sopris. I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, it’s Aspen,'” she said. “We got into Snowmass thinking it was Aspen. So yeah, that was my introduction to the valley.”

While living in Snowmass and working at the hotel, she began working in dental offices again, and she realized yet another passion through her new lens on life.

“I started to fall in love with this community through my patients,” Gatdula said. “And I want to be more because how much more I am affecting people, by taking care of their oral health, and if something as simple as breathing saved my life.”

She went back to school and obtained a degree in public health and specialized in orofacial myofunctional therapy. She now helps people with breathing disorders, sleep apnea and temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMJ) pain, and children to guide them with growth and development of their airways.

Eventually, Gatdula left dental offices behind and began working in places like schools and with nurse practitioners and behavioral health professionals in order to look at her patients holistically. She realized that dirty teeth are a manifestation of something bigger that may be happening in one’s life. For the past five years, she has had the opportunity to meet patients where they are and give them the chance to talk through their health histories with her.

“There’s this word in Tagalog, bayani, and it means to do the best you can for your community,” Gatdula said. 

Bayani does not have a direct translation to English, but Gatdula practices it everyday with her craft and her patients. She has even worked with the city of Aspen to host a wellness workshop, and she is in talks to do more in the future. She also just received the 2024 Philips Heart to Hands Award from RDH Magazine, awarded to dental hygienists who “go above and beyond in their career.”

“That near death experience certainly has influenced my life and the way that I live,” Gatdula said. “But also in a way that I hope to encourage my patients to take care of themselves. I mean, I’m just grateful to be alive. I’m grateful that I get to live here. I think this is a lot of what keeps me here, and this is a big part of my story, the last 10 years and the work that I’ve been able to do. And a lot of it is because of this place and the beauty that we’re surrounded in.”

Editor’s note: This is the first installment in a series of profiles focusing on the participants in the Writ Large storytelling event. This series will focus on those that make the Roaring Fork Valley what it is.