Indian-origin ex-Deloitte partner says she suffered last-stage Lyme disease as she worked 100-hour weeks: ‘Spent 8 months in bed’

“My superpower wasn’t being smarter than anyone else; it was that I could outwork almost anyone,” she said. After moving to San Francisco in 2014, her workweeks stretched to 100 hours, often leaving home at 4.00 AM and returning around 1.00 AM for months at a time, the report noted.

Following this, she suffered several health scares, including headaches, recurring infections, adrenal fatigue, and shingles. After visiting 15 doctors, she was diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease, likely dormant since childhood but triggered by stress.

By 2019, Purushothaman spent eight months bedridden, battling neuropathy and losing sensation from her elbows to knees. “If success doesn’t include health, is it really success?” she wrote in her blog on Business Insider.

She left Deloitte in May 2020, and just six weeks later, sold her debut book, The First, the Few, the Only: How Women of Color Can Redefine Power in Corporate America, to HarperCollins. Drawing from interviews with 500 senior women of colour, she also co-founded nFormation, a community for professional women of color, and began speaking on corporate stages across the United States of America. But soon, she found herself back in the same cycle of overworking.

When her health began to decline again, she shut down nFormation and launched re.write, a thinktank dedicated to reimagining the future of work, in 2024. Now an executive fellow at Harvard Business School, she said, “I worried at first if I made a mistake leaving,” she said. “Now I know I didn’t lose anything. I gained and grew.”