THE POWER OF HER | Dr. Natya Stroud Is Bringing Menopause and Sexual Health Care Closer to Home

Raised in North Minneapolis, the founder of Second Bloom Women’s Health followed a long path from teenage motherhood to nursing practice. Now she wants women navigating menopause and sexual health concerns to have time to ask questions and take part in their care.

MINNEAPOLIS, MN (October 19, 2026). By the time a woman reached Dr. Natya Stroud at Mayo Clinic, she had been in pain for months. She told Stroud she had seen five doctors, undergone tests and tried prescribed creams. The pain in her genital area kept getting worse.

Stroud asked about the earlier visits. The woman said that although she had received pelvic exams, no one had looked directly at the place that hurt. Stroud examined her and saw a lesion. She arranged for an urgent assessment by a specialist in gynecologic dermatology and asked that it be biopsied.

The diagnosis was vulvar cancer. By then, Stroud said, it had spread to the woman’s lymph nodes, and she needed extensive treatment.

What Stroud remembers is that the woman had sought care early. She kept returning because the problem had not gone away. In Stroud’s account, she ultimately traveled across the country before receiving a diagnosis.

That patient’s experience is among the reasons Stroud is preparing to open Second Bloom Women’s Health, a clinic focused on menopause, sexual health and women’s health more broadly. Stroud, a nurse practitioner raised in North Minneapolis, wants patients to have time to explain what is happening, receive a careful assessment and understand their choices.

Her plans for Second Bloom also reflect what she learned long before she entered an exam room. As a teenage mother, she depended on people who helped her find a way to stay in school. Later, she turned her home into a place where other families could find clothes for their children. Throughout those experiences, she said, access to the right information could change what happened next.

Stroud spoke with MinneapoliMedia on October 9 for The Power of Her, a series featuring women of African descent in Minnesota whose leadership and service are shaping their communities. She said Second Bloom is close to opening. She did not give an opening date or location during the interview.

North Minneapolis, and the People Who Believed in Her

Stroud was born and raised in North Minneapolis, where her family’s roots go back generations. As a young child, she lived near Plymouth Avenue and Golden Valley Road, close to the parkway. Aunts, cousins and other relatives lived within a block or two of one another. Children could spend time outside with the sense that adults nearby were watching out for them.

She was particularly close to two cousins her age. Both were boys; she was the only girl of the three. They remained the youngest children in the extended family for years, with the next older cousins about a decade ahead of them.

Money was tight. As Stroud grew older, she became aware of the community programs and other help her parents used to support the family. She remembers being embarrassed and worrying that classmates would find out. At the same time, relatives were making sure she had opportunities. They asked about her schoolwork, brought her news of activities and told her what they thought she could become. Some called her “the lawyer of the family.”

Stroud was raised by her mother and her stepfather, whom she calls her father. He has always considered her his oldest daughter, she said, and “step” has never been part of the way he speaks about her.

Only as an adult did she fully appreciate what her extended family had done. They could not always pay for the opportunities they wanted her to have, but they paid attention, encouraged her and helped keep her engaged. She believes they were also trying to protect her from circumstances that might narrow her future.

Their confidence in her became especially important when she was still in high school.

“I Had a Plan”

Stroud married young and had twins while she was in high school. Another daughter followed soon afterward. She said her local high school did not want her to remain enrolled while visibly pregnant. As she understood it, administrators thought her presence would send the wrong message to other girls.

Stroud was ahead on her credits and intended to take college courses through Minnesota’s Postsecondary Enrollment Options program. She also worked. Becoming a parent meant she needed a way to support her children, but she did not see it as a reason to give up school.

“I had a plan,” she said.

During the pregnancy, Stroud developed a high-risk medical condition. Her obstetric providers ordered bed rest. She told them she was a high school student with a job and could not afford to fall behind. The care team brought in a social worker, who arranged for a district teacher to come to her home while she could not attend class.

“I am not dropping out of school,” Stroud recalled telling them.

She was also enrolled in Upward Bound, a college preparation program. Her mentor there knew she was pregnant and had a friend who was principal of New Vista High School, which served pregnant and parenting students. Despite a long waiting list, Stroud said, the principal admitted her after she had completed bed rest and recovered from the twins’ birth.

New Vista had daycare and parenting classes on site. It lacked the college-level courses Stroud had planned to take. She was not the only student who wanted more advanced work, and the group asked the school to offer it. New Vista hired additional teachers for courses including calculus.

At home, Stroud sought out programs that could help her provide for her children. She enrolled in WIC and found community sources for car seats, clothes and other necessities. Those resources did not make school or parenting easy. They gave her a way to keep moving toward a future she had already imagined.

Stroud also converted to Islam during high school. She took the shahada before marrying, around the same time as her husband, whom she had known and dated for years. He is the same man she is married to today.

What Began With a Girls’ Group

As their children grew, Stroud and her husband wanted their daughters to make friends in a halal setting. They explored Girl Scouts, she said, but many troops met at churches and included Christian elements. Stroud started a girls’ group at home instead.

The girls made art, worked on crafts, helped cook and talked about subjects such as caring for the environment and being good to a sister. Parents could leave their daughters for a few hours. The group was free.

Over time, families began leaving outgrown children’s clothes with Stroud. She knew what it was like to need diapers, crib bedding and other basics, so she made space for the donations and invited people to tell her when someone needed them. A family dealing with a lost job could come by. So could a parent whose children had outgrown their clothes before there was money to replace them.

For a few years, Stroud said, her home functioned as an informal donation center. She did not keep a list of who came or what they took.

“I was just a vessel,” she said.

The experience shaped her understanding of how help moves through a community. One person has clothes to share. Another knows about a program. A third knows the family that needs both. Stroud had seen how much it mattered when someone took the time to pass along an opportunity.

One of her daughters later put that knowledge to use in a high school health class. The students were assigned to build a budget for raising a baby, an exercise intended to show how difficult it would be. Her daughter asked what Stroud had done as a teenage mother. Stroud told her about the programs she had found and how she had looked for help. Using that information, her daughter built a budget that included an apartment, subsidized child care and money left over. She received top marks, Stroud said.

The assignment reminded Stroud of a point she returned to throughout the interview: “If you don’t know, you don’t know.” People may need an answer, but first they need to know that a question can be asked and where to take it.

The Years It Took to Become a Nurse

No one in Stroud’s family had worked in health care. She had always been good at math and science, and student career surveys suggested fields such as law. Those recommendations captured her analytical side, she said, but missed how much she liked observing and caring for people. Nursing offered both.

It also offered a practical career for a mother raising a large family. Stroud valued the pay and the possibility of moving among specialties without having to earn a new degree each time. She wanted work that could support her children without forcing her to hold several jobs.

She studied part time through much of her twenties. By the time the youngest of her six children started kindergarten, she decided to study full time. She worked as a nursing assistant while earning her first nursing credentials, became a licensed practical nurse and then a registered nurse through Minneapolis College. She earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Metropolitan State University and a Doctor of Nursing Practice from the University of Minnesota, where she trained in adult and women’s health.

Stroud described those years as a demanding stretch for the whole household. She and her husband had to attend to their children, their work and their marriage while she continued from one program to the next. The schedule cost them sleep. Finishing school required the family’s effort as well as her own.

As a nurse, Stroud worked in general medicine and then labor and delivery. She had grown up surrounded by women in her family and had watched some of them struggle to make their concerns understood. In clinical practice, she saw women who brought children to appointments because they had no one to watch them, and others who saw multiple providers before finding someone who could identify a problem and explain what to do. She recognized some of those difficulties from her own experiences seeking care.

One case from early in her nurse practitioner career tested what it meant to speak up for a patient. Stroud had been working with community groups to educate women about health concerns related to female genital cutting. She also trained labor and delivery nurses on how to speak with and examine patients who had undergone the practice.

She recalled a patient who came to a hospital to give birth after asking her clinic during pregnancy about reopening the affected area. According to Stroud, the woman had been told that what she requested was illegal. The area had to be opened during delivery. When the patient asked that it remain open afterward, Stroud said, the providers again told her they could not do so.

Stroud believed the providers misunderstood the law and raised her concern with the patient’s nurse. She also worried about whether clinicians who believed the procedure was prohibited could safely provide the care the patient wanted. Stroud said she advised follow-up with another provider, although that meant the woman would need a second procedure. She considered that outcome far from ideal.

Afterward, she reported the matter to the birthing center’s director and asked to remain anonymous. She was about to graduate, she said, and wanted the providers educated rather than punished.

Stroud said she spent nearly a year after graduation searching for her first nurse practitioner position. She had interviews but received no offers or explanation. Classmates encouraged her to apply to Mayo Clinic, and she was hired there.

The Women Who Reached Mayo Still Looking for Answers

Stroud began at Mayo in a diagnostic clinic for women at high risk of breast cancer. Some patients came with a new problem and little understanding of why they needed further testing or what options they had. She spent time answering questions that had followed them into the clinic.

As she gained experience in breast health, Stroud asked to work in another area as well. She joined a women’s clinic that Mayo later called the Menopause and Sexual Health clinic. She divided her week between the two practices.

The patient with persistent genital pain came to the latter clinic. The woman told Stroud she had seen five doctors and had been tested for sexually transmitted infections. She had been told that menopause or irritation from feminine products might explain her symptoms and had tried estrogen and steroid creams. The tests came back negative. The pain remained.

Stroud examined her and found a lesion she had not seen before. She referred the woman for an urgent specialist assessment and biopsy, which showed vulvar cancer. Stroud said the woman’s symptoms had been progressing for almost six months, and the cancer had reached her lymph nodes.

For Stroud, the troubling fact was that the patient had done what people are urged to do: she noticed a change and went to a doctor. When the answer did not fit what she was experiencing, she kept looking for help.

Other women came to Stroud during perimenopause and menopause after being told their lab results were normal. They described waking at night with hot flashes, struggling to concentrate at work, and living with body aches or joint pain. Some were afraid Stroud would tell them, too, that nothing was wrong.

She said she begins with the woman’s symptoms and history while considering other conditions that could produce similar problems. A blood test alone does not necessarily answer a patient’s questions about this stage of life, she said. Sometimes the first useful step is helping a woman describe what has changed.

Patients have told Stroud they use reminders and routines to manage mental fog at work. Vaginal dryness, painful intercourse or a change in sexual desire can affect relationships, particularly when a woman has not been given an explanation she can share with her partner. Children may notice that their mother is tired, irritable or less engaged. Stroud said the changes can last for years, but their duration and effects vary from one person to another.

She wants partners to learn about what women may experience and to acknowledge it, even when they do not have a solution. She wants workplaces to respond with patience, while remaining alert to the possibility that greater awareness of menopause could be used to disadvantage older women.

Finding a provider who is trained and willing to discuss sexual health and menopause is itself a challenge for some patients, Stroud said. She encourages women to research providers’ training, read reviews and look through the in-network choices offered by their health plans. She said women of color are less likely to receive treatment for concerns related to menopause and sexual health, though she did not cite a specific study during the interview.

Stroud also described patients struggling to fill prescriptions for estrogen patches, a form of hormone therapy she commonly prescribes. Some have messaged her after calling multiple pharmacies, she said, and colleagues elsewhere have reported similar difficulties. She did not know the cause. MinneapoliMedia has not independently established the scope of the supply problem.

The Purpose Behind Second Bloom

Stroud said she had spent years pointing people toward resources and offering information, and eventually wanted more freedom to provide that care directly. At Mayo, she could address questions within each clinic’s specialty, but her interest was in the overall health of women. A patient receiving cancer care, for example, might also need sustained help with symptoms related to treatment. That conversation could require more time than the cancer visit allowed.

Large health systems also brought financial targets and organizational priorities that shaped her work, Stroud said. Opening a clinic means taking on financial responsibility herself. It also gives her the flexibility to decide how to reach patients and what a visit should make room for.

Working in Rochester had taken her away from the community where she grew up. With Second Bloom, she wants to care for women in Minneapolis and across Minnesota while reconnecting with North Minneapolis.

Stroud said the clinic will offer lifestyle, integrative and prescription options. She does not expect every woman who comes in to start treatment. A patient may simply know that she no longer feels like herself and want to understand why. Stroud wants her to be able to ask, receive an assessment and leave knowing what choices are available.

“I’m not here to dictate what has to happen,” Stroud said. “I’m here to offer information and education so that women can make choices for what works best for them.”

She said she will return to MinneapoliMedia with an update when Second Bloom opens. For now, its approach can be traced through her own life: relatives who kept noticing her abilities, a social worker who found a way for her to stay in school, a mentor who helped her enter New Vista, and the families who came to her house because someone had told them she might have what they needed.

Second Bloom will be a clinic, with the responsibilities that come with treating patients. Stroud’s hope is that a woman who walks in uncertain about what is happening to her body will find a knowledgeable person willing to listen, examine the concern and help her decide what comes next.

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