When You Accidentally Manifest What You Don't Want: Three Simple Life Lessons Learned from a Health Scare

In this week's episode, Laurie is talking about a recent health scare (she's fine!), why she thought she may have accidentally manifested it, and the three simple life lessons she learned from it.

LINKS + MENTIONS:
"Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle" by Emily Nagoski, Ph.D and Amelia Nagoski, DMA

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Transcript

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what I want to talk about today is two things: one I'm going to walk you through what I went through because there are some of you out there who might be putting off some diagnostic testing. And it's gosh, it's always better to do it sooner than later and, and deal with things early on. If you can then just let them linger. So I want to talk a little bit about that, but then I also want to talk about a couple of lessons that I learned going through this. Welcome to the School of Midlife podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Reynoldson. This is the podcast for the midlife woman who starting to ask herself big life questions. Like, what do I want? Is it too late for me? And what's my legacy beyond my family and my work. Each week we're answering these questions and more. At the School of Midlife, we're learning all of the life lessons they didn't teach us in school and we're figuring out finally what it is we want to be when we grow up. Let's make midlife your best life Well, Hey friends. Welcome back to another episode of the School of Midlife podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Reynoldson. I don't know if today's episode would be considered a follow on. Episode two last week when I talked about. It's time to stop waiting. You know, don't wait until say you get a bad diagnosis or there's a death in the family. Or you lose your job or divorce or, you know, something that really takes you by the shoulders and, and just shakes you a little bit and, and get you out of your autopilot live the same day, every day way of living. Thanks so much for all the comments on last week's episode. I love hearing from all of you. You can always get me on email. There's a link in the show notes. You can find me over on Instagram, DM me there, but. I love hearing that episodes are speaking to you. And last week certainly seemed to leave a lasting impression on several of you who felt like you were waiting until something went wrong or some day, or the time was right or everything was perfect. I will say. I had been thinking about, and I know I mentioned this in the episode, but I had been thinking about recording last week's episode for a while. And then all of a sudden. Um, So, you know, I'm thinking. Okay, I'm going to record an episode about let's stop waiting. Let's stop waiting until a diagnosis or a divorce or someone die. You know, like big life events and then you take charge or you, you take control of your life and you start being really intentional about how you're going to live it instead of just letting life happen to you. And. Over the course of the weeks where I was noodling that and thinking about it, I ended up with a bad mammogram. If any of you have been in that situation, you get a little note from your doctor or someone calls you and says, we need you to come back in for additional screening. And I shit, you not. I was like, did I manifest this? I've been thinking about doing this, talking about this on a podcast. I have been thinking about, you know how your life changes when you do have those big life events that you weren't expecting. And then all the sudden, you start living a different way. You get really intentional about what you want to do and you turn off the autopilot and you actually start driving the car or the plane or the boat or your, your in the driver's seat in your own life. So when I get this message from my doctor. And she says, we found some things on your mammogram and we need you to come back in for additional testing. I was literally like, You are kidding me. I manifested this. I am a big believer in manifestation of. Thinking about all the ways in which our mind actually impacts what happens in our life. And. I just couldn't believe like really. That's what I manifested. It's interesting too, because when you start looking at the brain and how your mind works. Your brain cannot decipher between what is reality? And what is worry. If you worry yourself through an entire situation, your body reacts in exactly the same way. You still feel anxious. You still feel stressed out. Your mind doesn't actually know that that's not happening to you. So there is something about when we concentrate on the things that we don't want to do. That's the other thing, your, your mind doesn't really read the word don't. So like, if you say. You keep telling yourself. I don't want a cancer diagnosis. Then your brain actually goes through what happens. You feel all the feelings, it walks through all the emotions. And that's exactly what I did while I was going through. Uh, about three weeks between when I received the call. And then last week when I was finally able to go in for additional screening. Good news. Everything is fine. Um, it turns out I have extremely dense breasts. I don't know what they saw, but clearly it was very close to my chest wall, given how the additional screening took place. But what I want to talk about today is two things: one I'm going to walk you through what I went through because there are some of you out there who might be putting off some diagnostic testing. And it's gosh, it's always better to do it sooner than later and, and deal with things early on. If you can then just let them linger. So I want to talk a little bit about that, but then I also want to talk about a couple of lessons that I learned going through this. So we'll finish there. About three weeks ago, I get a call from my doctor's office and they found something on my initial, my annual mammogram, and I needed to go in for additional screening. And this has actually happened to me twice before. One time I was training for a half iron man. Well, when, when you're training for a half iron man, there are many days where you have an eight, 10, a 12 hour workout. And you can literally go, say from a 60 mile bike ride to attend to 13 mile run. And you don't change your clothes, or you can go from swimming to getting on the bike or swimming and running. So there. These combination workouts and you don't change your clothes. And what we figured out there is that I had a hair follicle on my breast that was a little clogged, you know, it was, it was a little sweaty hand because I was doing so much training. That was an easy one to check off the list. And then I needed additional screening, probably about two or three years ago. I still remember, I was the last appointment on a Friday afternoon. And every time I go in for a mammogram, I always kinda like to go back and say, Hey, can I just take a quick peek at the. The images, not that I have any idea how to actually read them. But. You know, I've seen enough internet pictures that I think, oh, okay. Well, I could probably see something if it was very obvious. I mean, Think about it like when your car breaks down and you open up the hood and you're just looking for some that, you know, like some pipe that's, that's just. Flopping everywhere. Maybe there's some steam coming out of it. But for most of us, when we opened the hood of a car, we have no idea what we're looking at. And the same I'm sure is true of me looking at the images on the computer screen when I get a mammogram, because that is not my job. That's not what I do. I don't actually know how to read them but here I am. Last appointment on a Friday. And you can tell there there's this shadow on the bottom of one of the images and it looked just like a skin flap, like, um, There was just a flap of skin that was folded over on itself. And I even pointed it out to the. X-ray tech and said, should we do this one again? This looks to me like the. You know, maybe there's some skin involved there and she's like, no, no, no. You're the last appointment for the day. We'll send it off if it's nothing, you know, no big deal. And I actually am leaving town. So it was the last appointment of the day. She didn't want to stick around. We didn't redo it. I wasn't surprised when I got the call that said we need to do some additional screening on this this kind of strange area and sure enough, it was nothing. It was a skin flap and that's what created the shadow. Because I had not seen anything that I thought looked weird on the mammogram, it was really surprised when I received a call that I needed to go back in for additional screening. And. I scheduled the appointment. I got the call on a. Thursday three weeks ago, I called the next day Friday to schedule my appointment and they were like, great news. We had a cancellation, we can get you in on Monday. And I'm thinking that is fantastic because then yeah, I just have to spend the weekend keeping my emotions in check, not worrying about it too much, but I can get an answer on Monday. And then we were driving to Sun Valley that Friday. And I get a call at quarter to five on a Friday afternoon, and they say, you know what? We screwed up with your scheduling and we can't get you in for another three weeks. I was. I probably didn't handle the call super well because when your doctor says you need additional screening, because there might be cancer. Like, I want to know that sooner than later, I want to check that box. So we have done everything that we've can sooner than later. I don't want to have to live with that for a while. So I probably wasn't super nice with the woman who called me because she was the same woman who had called I'd talked to her earlier in the day. She's the one that had scheduled my appointment. But I guess there's a, there's a. Sequence, you know, you have redo mammogram images first, and then you go to ultrasound. And for some reason, the way she scheduled it, the ultrasound was first. And, and I, I guess I don't really know. But suffice to say I had to wait three more weeks. And so last week I go in and. I've got an eight o'clock appointment. I show up. There is no one in the waiting room. It's, it's kind of strange actually, because it took so long to get in. And I'm, I was expecting that there would just be a ton of people there. And no one. So I go in, they take me back to the back. I Put on that pink gown that ties and opens in the front. And I sit down in one of those small waiting rooms. Where there are two changing rooms that just have. Uh, curtain that goes across, and then there are four seats in this waiting area. So it's super small. There are a chair and a table between them and then another chair on one side and then across is this, I guess, in this love seat, sort of medical piece of furniture. It's small. So I am sitting in one chair and the chair next to me is a young woman. We'll call her Brittany. She was weepy. Um, she had the kleenex, all wadded up in her hand and her eyes were just red and swollen. And she looks over at me and she smiles and she says, well, how was your day going? And she was just very cheerful. How are you today? How's your day going? And. I could tell that she was very upset and I said, well, um, you know, We're both here And she lost it. She just completely broke down. She was so apologetic. Turns out they had found a lump from her first screening, mammogram ever. She'd never had one before. She was clearly younger than I was. And she was very, very upset. I mean, you, you know how, when you have a tissue in your hand for so long and you just. It's a wet and it gets watered up and it's tattered and. I just felt so bad for her. For me, i, I really didn't think that anything was wrong. And so I was trying my best to console Brittany and talk her off the ledge and, you know, just make her feel comfortable. She was the sweetest, young thing. They took her back first. While she was in her screening, I'm sitting there, you know, looking around there, there are no magazines to read. I could have taken out my phone. I didn't. I'm looking at my pink robe. It's got all of these. Almost like hand drawn green and a darker shade of pink flowers on it. There are words like hope and courage and learning and love. And. I kept thinking to myself, these are the ugliest Smocky. This is just terrible. We, we need to change what these. Gallons look like they're just, I don't know. Not good. And. Brittany comes back and turns out. No cancer. All good. They did the screening. Everything was fine. She was great. She left with a huge smile on her face. Super relieved. And she had told me that she had taken the entire day off of work that her mom and her sister were in the waiting room for her. And. They, you know, depending on what the diagnosis was, they were going to either go. Pav some brunch together. Or go home. So when Brittany left, she was very excited to go have brunch with her mom and her sister. And I was thrilled for her that everything was fine. Next is my turn. And when I walk in, they tell me that I am scheduled for both a mammogram and an ultrasound. And then they say, but you won't need the ultrasound unless we see something on the mammogram. We took, I don't know, four or five pictures of my right breast. And like I said, whatever they were looking at, must've been super close to my chest wall because mammograms don't generally bother me. I mean, they're not comfortable, but they're also not painful. This one was like the compression piece of the machine was just digging into my bone. There were probably three different views that I just felt like it was trying to crush my chest wall, not my collarbone, but just right below it and super uncomfortable. They take the pictures they say, just go ahead and sit here for a minute. I'm going to go. Um, show these to the radiologist and depending on what happens, what we see. You can either go home or if we see something else, then you're going to have to have an ultrasound. And they came back and they said, You need an ultrasound. And it was at that moment. I was like, holy shit. Like I, for the first time I thought. This, this isn't good. I had completely convinced myself that everything was going to be fine. I did not sleep well the night before. I mean, I. The night before the appointment was really the time that it finally set in that, gosh, maybe this isn't going to go the way that I expected it to. But other than that, I really felt very optimistic about all of it until they said. Then I needed additional screening and then I needed an ultrasound. I go back to the waiting area. At this point now there is another woman there, a mom of three young boys. She looked younger than me older than Brittany. Not terribly chatty, but she did tell me she had three young boys and I just, I thought, man, it's, it's so tough that women are. Facing. Potential diagnosis sees that will change their whole life. Right? Like Brittany's young. This was her first mammogram. She was very concerned that she had breast cancer. And then this other woman, a mom of three young boys. I mean, how, how would her life change and her, how would her son's life? How would they change? If their mom ended up with. Uh, cancer diagnosis. And I just kept thinking about how different all three of us were, but also what we were potentially facing. All the same. And it was super sobering.'cause like I said for the first time now I'm sitting there in the waiting room. Thinking. Like shit's getting real. Th this could not be what I want it to be. And I. Go in, have the ultrasound I'm sitting there waiting while the radiologist reads it. And the tech comes back and says, all good. It turns out you have extremely dense breasts. She gives me a couple of pamphlets for some additional screening that I could have done, which I guess calculates the. Risk that you could develop breast cancer. I'm already in a bit of a high risk category because my mother had breast cancer. And I've been on hormone replacement. Uh, therapy since 2000. Nine, I think so 15 years, which is kind of a long time. Cause I had to have a hysterectomy pretty early. So I'm already in this. Increase risk category. I don't know if I'll do the additional screening or not. Anyway. That all turned out. Great. Here are the lessons that I learned that I want to share with you. Number one. And this, this I learned from Brittany. Clear your calendar for the day. I had such a big day. Last week when I went to my screening. I had eight o'clock appointment. I had a board meeting at lunch, and then I had another very important business meeting that afternoon. I had a presentation to give. I had an important meeting. It didn't ever occur to me. That. I should clear my calendar for the day. That I shouldn't take any additional appointments that I shouldn't offer up my time, because what if I got bad news? How then am I going to show up for an important business meeting in the afternoon? How am I going to show up for a board meeting? It just reminded me of that. I'm sure you've seen it, but that meme that floats around that says, um, The difference between Americans and Europeans, Europeans, you get an out of office email that says I'm out of office on vacation. Holiday actually cause they're European, uh, for the entire month of August. And if it's important, I will get back to you when I returned to the office in September. Whereas in the U S. The out of office says. I wi ll be out of the office this morning for a kidney transplant. You should be able to reach me by phone. I will be checking voicemail messages and email messages. My response might be a little delayed though. How often do we do that? Where we. Potentially have something heavy. And we still assume that we can be all things for all people. Like I will grieve my health. Um, I will grieve this diagnosis. After work. After I get done with these meetings. You know, for a three minutes in the car ride. And we compartmentalize how much time that we have to actually run through the emotions. And take it for me. We have got to stop doing that. Next time this happens and hopefully it doesn't, but. Any time that there is a possibility that the news could be less than what I want it to be. Could be bad, could be different. It could be heavy. I am going to clear my calendar for the day. No more of this. All right, I'm going to go in the morning. Potentially get some bad news. Go to a board meeting. Go to an important business meeting. I'm not going to do that. Especially because I hadn't slept well the night before. So lesson here is. If you can, and I don't know why you can't, but clear your schedule for the day. Take the day off, maybe take the next day off if you need to. But for sure. I don't expect to go into an appointment, potentially get some bad news and then just feel like you are ready to go back to the office. And. Crush your day. It's too much. The next lesson I learned is. How important it is to be grateful, always. It's so easy for us to practice gratitude when we get good news, when things turn out the way we want it to, when we get the promotion we're seeking, when we get the praise that we want, when we finished the big project, when just when things are going well in our life. Very easy. Two. Practice gratitude to be grateful, to look around and think, you know what? I've got a pretty good life. It's a little harder. When things aren't going as planned. When we are facing a tough diagnosis or a life changing moment or period in our life, whether that's a death of a family member, a diagnosis. Uh, loss of a job. Whatever it is. It doesn't even have to be that big, but if we can find gratitude, always if we can look around and be grateful for what we have, even when things aren't going as well as we'd hoped. That's golden. Absolutely. And it's so important. For our long-term health. If we're only focusing on the negative, if we're only focusing on what's going wrong. Then, like we've talked about before, whatever we focus on, we will find. The more, we focus on the things that are going wrong. It's just this negative energy. It's no good. It's doing no one. Any good. If you can flip that and be grateful for even small little moments now don't misunderstand me. There are for sure. Going to be times in your life that suck. Things happen that you don't. You don't want, they are they're uncomfortable. They're sad. They are. Just terrible things, terrible things happen every single day. I'm not saying. You shouldn't feel those feelings that you shouldn't process those emotions? But. If you were able to find. Gratitude. If you're able to find something to be grateful for, even among the chaos. Or the despair. Anything. It's going to help you move through that emotion. It won't take it away. But it will help you move through the emotion. And that takes me to the last lesson that I learned. And it deals with moving through emotions. I don't know if you're like this, but for many years of my life, My. Method of dealing with. Something. Anything. Anything. Was to stuff down my emotions, like push those down as far as they can go. I will deal with those emotions later. I don't have time for that right now. It's inconvenient. I don't want people to see me cry. I will do that. On my own. By myself. The problem with that is oftentimes then we don't actually work through those emotions. And when we don't work through the motions. Then we feel things like stress. And burnout. And overwhelm. There's a great book by the Emily Nagoski and her sister, Amelia Nagoski called"Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle" and they talk all about how you have to move through emotions. So that. They don't get stuck. They don't, they don't get locked in your body. You have to feel it. And move through it. You don't have to move past it. You don't have to, there's no timeline to move through it because some things are going to take longer than others. But. Allow yourself to feel the feelings. Don't just stuff them down and move on and think I'll deal with that later. It's too important. For our long-term health. That. We actually. Process. Our emotions. Feel them. Sit in them. Understand them. Process them. And if you're like me, That, that that's something that I have had to learn because I would prefer not to deal with the emotions I would rather just. Understand that they're there, but move on to something else because I don't want to sit in that stress. I don't want to sit in that burnout. I don't want to sit in the discomfort. I just want to move on. It's I don't, I don't like to be in that spot. But just like, this whole idea that your body remembers everything. So trauma emotion. Feelings. If you don't deal with them. It's going to come up. Sometime in the future. Usually in a very inopportune time. Um, it could be the reason that you have back pain. It could be the reason you have hip pain. It could be the reason that you aren't sleeping at night. But science has shown that there are physical manifestations of the trauma that we don't deal with. And. Just. Even sitting in my car after the appointment. Not driving, not turning on the radio, not texting or calling anyone. Four. I, I mean, I was probably just sitting in my car. Feeling everything. For five or 10 minutes. And I know that that's not long. But for me, it was enough. It was enough to just sit there and take inventory of how I was feeling, what I was going through. Feeling the emotions and just letting them pass. Now that doesn't mean that I didn't then go on to do some journaling about it. Obviously I've been thinking about it because I'm now I'm recording a podcast episode about it. But. It's so important to take the time, to feel the things that you need to feel. I am thrilled that I. Am cancer-free. That they did not find anything. That is a problem. I am. Happy to have. Learned a lesson. Not that. There has to be a lesson in every experience that we have. But if I'm going to experience. Some overwhelm. Or worry. It would be great if there was something good that could come of it. And those three things are, if I'm doing this again, sometime I'm going to clear my calendar for the day. I understand the importance of being grateful, always not just when things are going my way. And the third important lesson that I learned is you got to feel the emotions, you can't stuff them down and expect to deal with them later. You have to process those emotions. I'd be interested to hear from you. If you have been in a similar situation. How will you have processed? And worked through. That feeling of, oh shit. What, how, like life is potentially going to change with whatever answer they give me. And how did you deal with that? I'm always interested to hear your thoughts. Drop me a line. Come find me on Instagram. Thanks so much for being here today. I will see you right back here next week when the School of Midlife is back in session until then take good care of her. Of yourself, of your health. It can change. It can change dramatically. Overnight. With one. Ultrasound. Wishing you good health. I'll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening to the school of mid-life podcasts. It means so much to have you here each week. If you enjoyed this episode, could you do me the biggest favor and help us spread the word to other midlife women? There are a couple of easy ways for you to do that first. And most importantly, if you're not already following the show, would you please subscribe? That helps you because you'll never miss an episode. And it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. Second, if you'd be so kind to leave us a five-star rating, that would be absolutely incredible. And finally, I personally read each and every one of your reviews. So if you take a minute and say some nice things about the podcast, well, that's just good karma. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you right back here. Next week when the school of midlife is back in session until then take good care.