Genius Teatime with Joan Russell

And the importance of poop emojis

This Genius Teatime talk with Joan Russell was “Running towards life: How changing perspective provides a better quality of life”. She shared her experiences with serious illness, wrangling the healthcare system, and finding new ways to embrace living thereafter.

Joan Russell of Intuitive North is a motivational coach specializing in life transitions. Located in San Diego, she works with people to design their life and step into their purpose through accessing their internal compass. While in the midst of a series of freak medical incidents, she had an epiphany that not only saved her life, but changed her path. Tiny mindset shifts in how we think and act can deliver improvements in quality of life quickly; this talk discusses the science and the timeless wisdom behind it.

Find more about Joan on her website https://www.intuitivenorth.com/

Donations for Genius Teatime benefited the Convalescent Aid Society, our speaker, and the Opulent Mobility accessibility fund. As always, no one was or will be turned away for lack of funds! Look below the video for the edited transcript of the talk and Q & A session.

Laura: Hello and welcome to Genius Teatime with Joan Russell. In her own words, Joan Russell of Intuitive North is a motivational coach specializing in life transitions. She works with people to design their lives and step into their purpose, accessing their internal compass. While in the midst of a series of medical incidents, she had an epiphany that not only saved her life, it helped change her path. You can find out more about Joan at intuitivenorth.com. Thank you and welcome. I'm going to now spotlight you, if that is okay.

Joan: All right, now I can actually minimize this and not have to look at myself.

Laura: Ha! I'll go on and use it. (laughing)

Joan: Hi, I'm Joan Russell. Thank you, Laura. We've known each other for years and I really appreciate the invitation to Genius Teatime. This has been such a great experience is to watch both the Genius Teatimes before and to be able to participate and donate to incredible causes, such as the Convalescent Aid Society and all of a sudden my mind just blanked. I knew that was going to happen.

Laura: The Opulent Mobility accessibility fund. So this is for ASL, for upcoming artist interviews and for the website.

Joan: Perfect, so now my mind blank is over with and it's the only time you're going to see that happen now. Fun. So this Genius Teatime is really, really special to me because this is telling a story that I've never told before and this is a story about an absolutely insane bonkers experience with getting super, super ill at the beginning of 2021 and how it really changed my life through an epiphany and some other learnings as well.

So I wanted to start off first of all by saying this is a presentation that's being workshopped for a TEDx audition in December. This is a long version of it. It's going to be scrunched down, down, down into fitting those pieces. So anything that you say that you like, let me know anything that you feel doesn't work. Please let me know. I am looking for feedback and feel free to ask questions in the chat along the way, if you'd like.

All right, so I am going to start this off with a little bit of a screen share. You're going to be seeing images throughout this presentation that will set the tone. Can you see that okay? Okay. This is an image of me in 2020. This is before everything happened. And when I say everything happened, you'll hear more about the everything. In this picture, I weigh about 140 pounds. You're going to see me lose a lot of weight throughout this process. So what happened? Well, what happened is during the pandemic, I decided to move to San Diego. And one of the reasons why I decided to move to San Diego was because it's a place that I'd always wanted to live my entire life, since the age of 16 or so. So in that photo, my weight was around 145 or so. I was living in Fullerton. Everything was pandemic-y and weird, and I was riding everything out solo. My corporate job was in absolute chaos, talking with Laura before this. I worked in the industry with airlines and movie studios. We licensed movies and television shows to airlines around the world so things were a little strange during the pandemic times and with working from home I realized that I could live anywhere I wanted to so I chose to move to San Diego.

One moment while I screen share again, let me take a few moments with getting the hang of it.

Sorry, all right, I am screen sharing the wrong thing. Laura is laughing at me at this point. Let's try that again. You'd think I did this for a living or something, right? All right, there we go, that's my image of me in Sedona Arizona at the last part of the pandemic, so then decided to move to San Diego as I was talking about. This image is of me walking through Tory pines. The thing is while I'm walking through Tory pines this day I have a little hole in my eye and I don't realize it. What I see is a black image on my retina, on my right retina, which really sucks because I know what that means. What it means is I'm about to have something called a retinal detachment. It's something that my family had had multiple times going throughout the past; my father had retinal detachments, my cousins have retinal detachments, everyone on my family side had a detached retina, at some point it was actually my worst fear and nightmare to the point where a friend of mine went and got Lasik and they were saying “you should get Lasik too for your eyesight” and I said “no I'm not going to have anyone touch my eyes because I know what's coming later on” and so it did.

On New Years Eve in 2020 right after I'd moved to San Diego I wound up in the emergency room. The person in the emergency room, the doctor unfortunately couldn't treat it. He said, “No, there's nothing wrong, I see something there but if that gets worse go to the other ER at UCSD.” So I'm walking around for four days with what's basically a torn retina. It didn't hurt, it's just this black hole in my eye, but I know what it is. So finally it started to rip a little bit more and on the third of January I wound up in the ER.

Warning, you may not want to see the screen, it's not bad. I chose one of the better images but just in case you get a little queasy for eyes that's the warning. So basically what happens when you have a retinal tear or detachment is that you go into a specialist, they stick a needle in your eye to give you some sedatives and then they go in and they laser it down. Mine was a rather large tear. I was very lucky it wasn't a detachment but it required a follow-up appointment. So I wound up having two procedures done, one on the third of January, one on the fifth of January.

Now I'm doing okay with this, I'm going through it and it's not that bad and I'm thinking okay, this isn't that bad, and then I wound up with inflammation in that eye. So I had to go back to the specialist and say hey something's going on here and it turned out that that was over a holiday weekend, it was Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday weekend. So they couldn't look at the the eye. Instead, they just threw some medication at me. So I went and I picked it up and I used it and had a severe allergic reaction in my eye. So, went in the next day to the doctor and he said, "Okay, obviously that was wrong. I gave you the wrong medication, stop using it immediately, but we have to put you on steroids because you do have inflammation in your eye and you're going to have to be on that for a couple of weeks." So I said, "Fine, we'll figure it out. I get home, get on the steroids." And at first for the first day or two, it was fine. And then it wasn't.

What happened was the steroids were eye drops and they wound up coming into my system through the tear duct. I had a severe reaction to the steroids. It made it just tore up my entire intestines and stomach and made my brain extremely anxious. That's ER visit number two. So ER visit number two, actually ER visit number three. I wound up with colitis and gastritis from it and I continued to have to take the steroids for two weeks.

So I have the steroids, they have me on something called PPIs which is supposed to help with the gastritis and that gave me even more side effects. So I had to stop taking the PPIs. It just got worse and worse. And ER visit number four happened where my right colon was found to be inflamed. They said, "Do you want to deal with the anxiety or do you want to deal with the pain and the things that are happening in your body?" I said, "Well, I know that the anxiety is a side effect of the steroids. So let's deal with the pain." So the doctor at the ER gave me Norco. I had a bad reaction to the Norco. I started having extreme nausea and throwing up. So the pain medication isn't helping either. So I talked to Dr. Knight. I still had to continue the Prednisolone for three more days. The inflammation was starting to clear up, thank God, and we tried the PPI back on board and they tried to give me some Xanax. I had a bad reaction to Xanax, which tore up my stomach even more and resulted in bloody stool. ER visit number five, where they had a new ER doctor.

By the way, this is in 2021, so you know what else is going on? COVID. So I'm going to these ERs constantly with a mask over my face and with anyone I can get for a doctor. This doctor was a real asshole, insisted because all the tests came back, fine, nothing was wrong, and that I needed to eat more food so I would stop losing the weight. Yeah. So we got home. I don't have any new medications other than what I have already, and because I'm in so much pain and things are going on and I'm still having to take the eye drops,

I have a panic attack, which is like a heart attack, which means ER visit number six this time because I'm having massive stomach back pain and like a white light shooting out of my chest.

Yeah. So what they decided to do was give me Lexapro for it because of the anxiety and everything else. Guess who had an anaphylactic shock response to Lexapro? It's a good time over here. That would be ER visit number seven and five days of anaphylactic shock because Lexapro stays in your system for five days. At that point, I always, like I don't want any medications. I have to get off everything. This is insane. Except we found a gastroenterologist who decided to up the Dexilant, which is the PPI to help with the bad gastritis, colon, heartburn, and reflux, and they also gave me a new test which is called an esophageal monometry.

So the esophageal monometry… Well before that, sorry, I lost track here of all the fun things I was supposed to share. So this is an image of the ER on one of my many visits. I don't know which one it was. All vital signs are normal, all my blood tests would come back completely normal, no inflammation markers or anything. They couldn't figure it out and you know what, eye drops aren't supposed to become systemic within your body. They're supposed to, so doctors just didn't believe the story. Even they gave me instructions for how to plug my eye to make sure that the eye drops didn't get in, didn't matter.

So one of the big lessons here, and this is the first lesson that I got throughout this journey. Well, sometimes you can do everything right, you can take care of yourself, you could do everything the doctors say, you can eat the diet you're supposed to eat, you can do whatever, everything that you're told to do and it just doesn't matter. Throughout my life, I was taught that if you're a good person and you do your best you're gonna be rewarded and everything's gonna be good, right? That's total bullshit. Let's just face it, but I still had that whole goody-two shoes la la la everything's gonna be okay. Even though, you know, in my life I've had horrible times. I've lost parents. I lost everything like my house.You name it. But still, I lived in that land of everything's going to be fine until this happened. And when this happened, something in the back of my head kept saying these words, you're going to be dead by June.

So, thinking about how something just doesn't matter anymore, it brings you back to, well, what control do I have? And that's when it came to me that you choose. You have an internal locus of control and an external locus of control. And this is a principle that is hopeful in mindset. You have a growth mindset or a limited mindset. If you have an external locus of control, things happen to you. Somebody else, what happens with them, matters to you. If they do something to you, then you don't have that control over it and you get internalize it. And you always say, why do things happen to me all the time? Why is this happening to me? I can't move forward in my life because this thing, this horrible thing, all of these ER visits and this illness and everything, this is happening to me. Why, why, why? When you realize that you have the power to choose how you react to this thing that's happening to you, you start to turn it around. And you start to think, wait, what if there's something else going on here that I'm just not aware of? And realizing that I have control over how I react to these things that happen to me. No, that was really, really enlightening to me.

That's me undergoing something called an esophageal monometry, which is the next test thing that we have to do. It was not fun. It doesn't look fun, does it? So what it is, it is designed to determine if acid is coming up in your stomach or if acid is coming up through into your mouth, into your throat and to your sinuses, into your ears, into even your eyes. If you have complete acid reflux, it can go back into your eyes as well, which is one of the things that they were thinking could be one of the reasons why I had such an impact with the eye drops. Doing the esophageal monometry, they also did a 24-hour pH test, which is very much the thing that you see there with sticking the tube down your nose and into your stomach. The results, absolutely perfect. No acid at all whatsoever. So this is when they set up the meetings with the psych department because they're thinking, well, it must all be in your head. So the UCSD psych department said, well, we can't give you the things that we want to give you because you're having reactions to all of them. Hey, why don't we give you these other meds and give you these drugs instead? Awesome. At the same time they gave me an MRI for my brain because I was also getting dizzy and having vestibular issues That came back perfectly clean as well so hell What are you gonna do next? And I'm not suffering as much as I was however, life has a way of changing things very rapidly in people's lives and this is just an interlude for one of my favorite friends.

That's my baby girl Curry. Laura you probably know her from having been on calls with us when we were doing postcards when she would walk in front of the camera at this exact moment We also had a veterinary issue going on where since I'm in a new city I'm at a new vet and that new vet decided to prescribe the wrong cat food which caused kidney failure? Two of my cats went into the ER. I have three cats. One came out, one did not So our IP Curry because she got caught up in this even though she didn't mean to get caught up in the storm.

It just happened that way.

So stomach obviously is back in big pain again after the 24-hour esophageal monometry.

It poked a hole in my stomach and, because why not? And because of the stress that's occurring and everything else, I'm now having bad diarrhea on top of it as well as this horrible smell that's emanating from my body. That of course nobody can figure out what's going on.

So we go to my gastroenterologist again, he says, "Try using Pepsid instead of the PPI because we had to get off the PPI for the esophageal monometry.” Guess who has a bad reaction to Pepsid? This gal. ER visit number eight happens for a Pepsid reaction, heart palpitations, more stomach and back pain, and passing out. At the same time, the GI doctor has now diagnosed me with esophageal hypersensitivity since they found nothing wrong from the esophageal monometry.

While we're doing this, I'm losing my hair, which is always a fun time too, why not? But hey, there are some moments of respite in this. While life is turning upside down, I decide that I'm just going to go hang out at Balboa Park and hang out with nature and meditate and try and be one with the world at this point because I'm trying to control my reactions to the things that are happening to me as much as I can. My reactions, not blaming anyone for any of this at this point because not much you can do, especially when you're told by an allergist that they send you to that it doesn't look like you're actually allergic to things and if you are, we can't test for them because we can't test for medications, but the odds are very good that you're allergic to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. So you probably won't be able to get vaccinated.

That's me and why I'm at the park going, "Okay, give me mercy, please." somebody give me mercy. So, yeah, it's at that moment that I get back together with my gastroenterologist, and he decides that he's going to try amitriptyline for pain. Now, amitriptyline is not an SSRI, so I'm probably not going to have a reaction to it. It's known to cause dehydration and other side effects, but it's also very, very well proven to help with these sorts of issues that I'm having, but they still haven't pinned down what it is for my gastroenteritis, but they're still working through it. So, let's try amitriptyline or throw in something else at the wall. And for a few days, it was okay until it very much wasn't.

And I wound up having to go to the ER again. ER visit number nine, reaction to amitriptyline, chest and upper stomach pain. And yet again, it's going to take four days to get out of my system because it stays in your system that long. So, we're having a great time, and we're starting to feel a little bit better with the amitriptyline until we really aren't. We stopped the amitriptyline. It's working out this way of its system.

And then I wind up having a massive urinary tract infection, probably caused from a combination of having bacteria in my system that we don't know where it came from, which could explain the smells and things, and the dehydration from the amitriptyline, which is urgent care visit number one. Yeah, now we're starting on the urgent care visits. Lobiotics are prescribed. Urgent care visit number two, having serious stomach pain from the lobiotics. Doctors said to stay with them. Urgent care visit number three, having urethral burning and pain still. Urgent care visit number four, urinating nonstop, having flank pain. All the tests came back back normal.

Urgent care number five, urethral burning, got different antibiotics this time. They never took a culture on me. So they finally took a bacterial culture on the UTI. Urgent care visit number six, hey, guess what? I actually have two UTIs, one of them's very difficult to treat. They prescribed Cipro. Urgent care visit number seven, fight effects from the Cipro were insane. Painful zaps and legs turns out I'm allergic to it. I'm switched to yet another antibiotic, which brings on urgent ER visit number 10. Body pain from the Cipro. I finally now have inflammation markers and things are showing up in my blood.

ER visit number 11, woke up in massive pain in the middle of the night. They can't find anything wrong still. The next day, my primary care physician and my gastroenterologist teamed up on me. And they said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with you. You need to go to hypnotherapy. It was at that point that I had my next lesson. And that lesson is, well, sometimes you have to take things into your own hands. Because what use is money if I'm gonna die? Remember that I'm going to die in June? This is May. What do you do if every single medical system that you know of fails you entirely?

At this point, I would have lost about 35 pounds. Something is very, very wrong here. Now,

years ago in the Great Recession, I wound up losing everything. I wound up losing family members who died. I wound up losing my house, my job. I was hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. And I had built back up to the point where I had a little bit of savings. And I didn't want to disappear. I had no choice. If I didn't decide to spend the little bit of money I had, I was going to die. Facts. So I hired a concierge doctor to get to the whole meat of it. Because I didn't know what else to do anymore. I didn't have any community support here in San Diego since I just moved here. I didn't really know anyone. I had no one to refer me any place because all the doctors are referring to each other. And at this point, they all suck. Let's face facts, they've all failed me miserably.

So I found a concierge physician and she saved my life. She's one of the people who did. This physician immediately said, I think you have two things. We're going to put you into a CT scan and I need you to do a fecal test as well. No one had ever done a fecal test. So the CT scan showed that I have diverticulitis. Which means I was put on a fourth antibiotic, one that actually didn't impact what I was discovered with next. The fecal matter test came back and it turned out that I had something called C. diff. Colostrium difficile. And colostrium difficile and I'm pronouncing that so wrong and I know it. Basically what it is, it's an infection that is a leading cause of healthcare associated infections. It's associated with significant mortality, morbidity, and mortality. According to the CDC, it's associated with 15,000 to 30,000 deaths annually, and is one of the most expensive things that increases inpatient costs. The amount of inpatient costs per annum exceed 4.8 billion in the U .S. And this is an entirely preventative super bug.

We still don't know where it came from, probably from the four different antibiotics they put me on. So, I was diagnosed with C. diff. They put me on yet another antibiotic, and it was the right antibiotic for this particular super bug. I had one course of it for seven days. Five days later, it came back. I had a pulsing course of it for three weeks, two days later, it came back. So, we had to do something that is expected to be in the future more of a frontline treatment for it, but it's pretty goddamn gross. And it's called a fecal microbiota transplant. Now, during COVID, they weren't doing these for anybody, because there was a donor fecal matter having COVID microbiota in it. So I was the first in San Diego to have this done for a period since COVID had started. So I had the fecal microbiota transplant and it didn't work and I'm getting weaker, lots weaker.

This is me for my intake photo before going in for my second fecal microbiota transplant. I now weigh 105 pounds. I've lost 40 pounds throughout this fun endeavor. They didn't know if I'd be able to walk into the hospital for the procedure. I was so weak. So the prognosis was if this doesn't work, I'm going to be in hospital. I'm going to be completely isolated in hospital and the prognosis is completely unknown. So that's fun. We got the second fecal microbiota transplant and it was done via colonoscopy, which means that I had to be tested for COVID, which the COVID test didn't happen yet at that time. You didn't know if you were going to have it or not. And I couldn't be tested because I couldn't get shots because I was allergic. So I did go in. I had the second fecal microbiota transplant and it was a success. Thank God.

Laura: (laughing)

Joan: Thanks Laura for commiserating along with me on that one. Yeah, so there is one drawback to this and that's that now I have IBS. IBS constipation to be exact. So we got out with the fecal microbiota transplant but now I can't poop. I'm doing body gymnastics over the toilet to try and get things out. I hired a pelvic floor PT with a little bit of money I had left after all of this which was pretty much none. I learned a new term it's called running the Bristol stool chart which means that you go all the way from being you know at complete constipation to complete diarrhea all in one sitting. There is nothing like the humility that happens when someone has to teach you how to poop again. Nothing like it. My friends and I started to joke that I needed to get instead of a tattoo like this a little poop emoji and I still think I'm going to at some point.

So yeah, cashed out all my investment accounts to pay for the medical bills, had a pooping record that I pooped 17 times in one day and yes I say poop over and over and over again because I am an inner third grader. To add insult to injury, SIGNA requested rejected my fecal microbiota transplant requests. They rejected them. So that was fun. So had to pay for that too. It was poop watch 2021. Every day was is it diarrhea? Is it constipation? Is it IBS? Which one is it at this particular moment in time? So to say that I was, had some trauma there, you would be correct. However, on the flip side, it was determined that I was not allergic to the vaccine shots. And I got my first vaccine shot, which is when I could get out again.

And so I did, let me share that, the image of me at the radio show. Enjoying life again after my first vaccine shot. And then having to go to Chicago for work because work never stops. During this entire ordeal, I took one day off of work because I could work from home. It was great. I could do that. How I still fit in all those ER appointments with nobody freaking out, I will never know. And at the same time, somehow I got promoted. Don't even ask. I don't understand it. Once again, there's only so much you can control.

So at this point, I'm slowly getting out of the house. And I realized my biggest epiphany of all, as I'm starting to get out of the house, as I'm starting to get better and have the COVID vaccines in me, I heard this phrase. And this phrase is, are you running towards life or away from death? Are you running towards life or are you running away from death? And it's a subtle thing, language, sometimes. Because during all of this with the AR visits and the urgent care visits, I was absolutely running away from death, running away, running away, running away. Dead in June. But that subtle shift made me realize that there's something else. And that's running towards life. Because when you're running away from death, you're living your life in a way that's avoidant. More importantly, it's not action driven. It's more, you're recoiling from it, and you're grasping for things. You're grasping for the next doctor, you're grasping for the next drug, you're grasping for the next idea, you're grasping, constantly looking. And when you're running towards life, there's an acceptance. There's an acceptance that this is my life. It's curiosity. It's bringing curiosity into the mix instead of, oh my God, I have to do something. It's more of, well, what if I did this? Or what if I tried this? Or what if I was patient and took a look at what happened? It brings in that sense of play. And it brings in something called aligned action. And doing actions that are aligned with running towards life. How does this help me grow? How does this help me change? How does this help me improve? As opposed to, oh my God, that's never going to work. It's a different energy all the way around.

So for example, Genius Teatime. What if I shared my story with Genius Teatime? Well, if you're running away from life, you're saying, "I would never ever do that. Oh my God, that would be way too embarrassing. How could that ever help me?" And if you're running towards life, you say, "Hmm, I'd like to do that. It would be an adventure, and I could help others." So it's a very subtle shift when you look at language sometimes. And if you took a look at those images of me at the beginning, I didn't have big smiles in any of my photos. Now, post-FMT and everything that happened to me, I am smiling every single fucking day, because, you know what? Life isn't happening to me. It's happening for me. Another subtle shift. It's the lessons we learn. Are they serving you? Are you relearning the same shit over and over and over again? Or do you find a way to break that cycle? And for me, breaking that cycle was shifting more into acceptance and reframing my thoughts and getting more into that aligned action that I talked about. Doing things that are right for me as well as thinking about how to help others and how to give service to others. That was huge.

Stanford University has recognized this for years and years, that shifting your thoughts and shifting your mindset to a growth mindset, it helps you to have significantly more happiness when you disrupt those distorted thoughts. So, next steps for me, we're getting out of my comfort zone. This is a journal entry from February 25th of 2021. And I just rediscovered this while I was getting ready for this Genius Teatime. And it's remarkable how my next steps actually completely mirror everything that's here. If you can't read it, it says what I want to make space for in my life. People in relationships, real connection with friends, have a lover, have a business, abundant health and well-being, paying attention to my nutrition, exercise, mindfulness and spirit, forging a meaningful business, doing the basics, getting started. I've got lots of learning to do, having a beginner's mindset, trusting the process, fun and adventure, which is one of my top values, wanting to explore San Diego, exploring and meeting new people, learning about myself and others, having relationships and connections and bringing in my new venture. I expect my life to be good and joyous. And so it is.

So with that, realizing I need connection, I started getting out more and more. And I wound up thinking, well, this isn't quite what I wanted to. So I decided to start up my own meetup group called Adventures in San Diego. And it was designed completely for me. I'm very, very selfish in this regard. I said to myself, I want to do these things. And if someone comes with me, that's great. And if not, that's great too, because I'm going to do them anyway. As of this morning, we had 1,905 members in the group, which completely floors me every time I think about it. And I do a minimum of two to three events per month. Now at the same time, does that mean that life stops? No, it does not mean that life stops. And that bad things don't still happen. But these things make you resilient and stronger and more better able to handle them. Once you've been able to process them and think about them differently in a way of you're running towards life and not running towards death. I had two cancer scares right after that, including a lumpectomy. And everything came back A-okay, which means it's time for another one of the parts.

While going through all of this, I had quietly worked to start a motivational coaching business, which has now shifted to being more of a life strategy coaching and motivational speaking. Alongside my day job a few years ago, I had become a certified professional coach. And I had been working with my team's coaching and mentoring them in my day job. And I'd been thinking about starting a business for a while. So Intuitive North was birthed December 31, 2021. Since then, my practice has worked one on one with people are going through life transitions. And I helped to support them in creating their new life path. We create a strategy together that's aligned with their values, their wants and their needs. And we work together to peel off their conditioning. And we all have conditioning. Obviously, the story shows I had plenty of it. I am now, as of this year, a graduate of the Better Business Bureau and GoDaddy's Empower Business Accelerator Program. And I was one of the winners of their pitch contest, which is super awesome because it's nothing I ever would have considered before in my life.

And to be perfectly honest, I did not want to do a pitch contest, but convinced myself to do it because why not? Is that that curiosity piece again? If you want to help others, if you want to try and run towards life, why not do all the things even if they're scary?

That's me doing a workshop for the Better Business Bureau because now I work together with the Empower program. I work closely with them and I help support the next generation of small business entrepreneurs going through it. That's me having way too much fun at a daybreaker earlier this year. Do epic shit, folks, because it's never too late. Tomorrow's my 57th birthday and the best is yet to come.Thank you for your time today and hearing my story. And thank you, Laura, for allowing me to share it with you all.

Laura: Thank you so much. That was awesome. Does anyone have any questions you would like? I can remove the spotlight. You can always put it in the chat if you would prefer.

Laura Y.: Joan, if this is going to be a TED talk, you need way more poo jokes.

Joan: I agree. I think I need to get the tattoo on my other wrist.

Laura Y: Yeah, I think you need the tattoo and I think you need poo memes interspersed with all of your medical pictures. I have some.

Joan: Yes, please.

Laura: That will be awesome.

Joan: I am all in on the poo jokes and today it was just like, how many poo jokes do I put in?

Laura: You should... More. More is good. I mean, please, don't get me wrong, you were doing well, but more is always good.

Joan: Excellent. Yeah, because it got a little repetitive because, holy crap.

Laura: Literally holy crap so much.

Laura Y.: Is that what you want to call your Ted talk? I mean…

Laura: Come on, you know, why not? Oh Wendy, you had a question.

Wendy: Yeah, I have a question, probably anecdotal at best but I'm pretty sure we're all kind of dealing with a little bit of PTSD from this pandemic and I'm wondering what kind of things you are seeing with your the people you're working with in terms of coming out of this has it either inspired them to want to live more or are they weighed down with the weight of what we've just survived?

Joan: It's a bit of both. I have clients that I work with who are still struggling with wanting to get out more and are feeling really stuck and I have clients that I've worked with who have gotten past that piece and have moved out into the world and created their own businesses and their own growth and have done some pretty stunning things. It depends on the person, it really does, and I'm also not sure how much is from the messaging that we received during the pandemic or may have been who they were before the pandemic since I didn't know them and their personalities at that time. It's an excellent question.

I'm going to add one more anecdotal piece on top of it which is I started the Meetup group in

October of 2021 and people were still very much reticent to getting out so a lot of the events were outdoor events, we tried to keep it very much outdoor. But it was a matter of being in the perfect place at the perfect time for the Meetup group. It was right at that liminal moment when people were changing to start wanting to get back together again and to create that community and also still being cautious.

Wendy: Thank you.

Joan: Thank you for the question.

Laura: Going through quite a lot of changes. Have you felt like this has helped doing the business has helped spur you on to make more of changes for your own self too?

Joan: Absolutely. Oh my God, so much. Because you don't know what you don't know and at the same time it also has kind of made me do things that I never, ever in a million years would have thought I'd be doing. Things like reels on Instagram. I never wanted to be in front of the camera. Instead during pandemic, obviously, I'm doing meetings all the time on Zoom and on Teams and things like that and now counseling, working with my clients remotely as well. So yeah, did you ever expect to be talking to a group of people through a laptop computer?

Laura: Not so much as I have been, certainly. I mean, I think a lot of that, once you have allowed yourself the possibility, a lot of things come up to either greet you or bite you in the butt or both.

Joan: That’s the perfect way of putting it and that goes back to the piece on acceptance. Once you accept it and you open it up and say, "Okay, bring it on. See what comes. See what comes."

Laura: Yeah. Have you found like you've had some doctors that you actually really appreciated? Because medical gaslighting is a very real issue for a lot of us. I think most of us as women have experienced it. And have you found some people that you genuinely can recommend that you really like being around that?

Joan: Yes.

Laura: Good.

Joan: My concierge doctor Amy Whitman. She's one of the people who saved my life. Head of gastroenterology at Scripps, Doctor Paredes came my life with the fecal microbial transplants. I now have a wonderful primary care physician and yeah, I know I'm missing somebody here. Oh, my OBGYN Dr. Robinson. As this all happened, one of the things, speaking of gas lighting women. Hmm. This is good. One of the things that happened was a few years ago I had been on HRT for symptoms and because I had had another scare with cervical cancer before they took me immediately off of any HRT about Friar, which that seems to have probably exacerbated some of this. Finding a new OBGYN was key to this because it turns out that yes there was absolutely urinary tract infection, but I was having lingering effects to it due to thinning.

Laura: Oh yes

Joan: So I wound up being put back on HRT, and that was when I had cervical bleeding again, which is when I had to get checked again for the cervical cancer and it turned out that I was just having too much progesterone. So the first OBGYN didn't even look at that, didn't even think about adjusting anything. She just said, “You have to get off this immediately or you're gonna get cervical cancer” and I'm saying (things) are going well, I don't have cervical cancer running in my family in any way shape or form. I don't have breast cancer. I have none of that. Thank God, knock on wood, so lucky. But at the same time, it's a very real thing, what I found throughout this entire endeavor is that doctors are checking boxes, and that's how the medical establishment is these days is. It’s check this box, check this box, if you have all of these things going on with you but we don't find a cause for it you're fine, go eat, let's bring you a hypnotherapist.

Laura: Yeah, put you on antidepressants, yeah I've had that one.

Joan: So the reason why I went to the nurse, doctors, I realized I had to get out of the system and getting out of the system made all the difference.

Wendy: I think it's women, I'm sorry, I think women were conditioned to acquiesce to authority, right, and totally, and I was in horrific pain one afternoon so badly that I took myself to the ER and the female nurse who was admitting people said what's going on, I said “It's horrible pain” and she said “well when is your period due”, I said “I don't know, a few days” and she just looked at me like I was a fucking moron and the next day I had an emergency appendectomy. And it's just like one of these things where women, we are already treated way worse than men because the gaslighting is constant and we're also taught not to cause problems so I think it's just such an important lesson and listening to your story about how you have to advocate for yourself at the risk of being told, oh we're going to 5150 you, you're crazy, you're being emotional, it's menopause, whatever, blah blah blah. It's so hard for us to get out of that mindset that oh, maybe they are right, and to keep advocating for ourselves because you know when something is not right with you, you know it.

Laura: It makes a big difference. I don't know of a single woman who doesn't have a story like this somewhere if, yeah, they had anything go wrong at all. Because so much of training has just been, they weren't really even training doctors using women as the subject until the 1990s. And there's a whole bunch of other really horrible racist terrible actions that have gone on a lot with medical care, but not paying attention to the people has been huge. And like sure, some people might be exaggerating, but most people have some sense of their own bodies. You know, why automatically assume? I'm so glad you got the help that you needed.

Joan: As am I, it was a great cost in all ways. Taught me huge lessons though.

Laura: Yeah, really. And concierge doctors also, what's this?

Joan: Okay, there are two types of concierge doctors things that I've learned through this. A concierge doctor, you can either pay lump sum for them to be able to follow your medical journey for a year. And they can bring you can consult with them. It'll cost extra sometimes for you to go in. It depends on what the package is. Generally, this will cost you a solid mid four figures, if not higher for the year. So usually like five to $10,000. In my case, this concierge doctor was on an appointment by appointment basis. And those appointments were $450 out of pocket. Each, I probably saw 15 times. That doesn't include the out of pocket for CT scans, the out of pocket for the FMTs. And yeah, yeah.

Laura: Yeah, it's an expensive process to actually get treated.

Joan: Yeah, and those point that $450 appointment, that was for a short appointment. So some of them would be longer. At the end, before I was going in for the FMTs, I would go in there for IVs because I was getting so dehydrated and everything. So, yeah, and I think that is what helped keep me standing in and out of hospital for those IVs.

Laura: Yeah, wow. I mean, it's really great to know about that. It's also really horrific that that's where we're at.

Joan: Yeah, my doctor was a physician, a well-regarded physician previously with Scripps and she couldn't work in the system anymore, so she started her own practice.

Laura: Got it.

Joan: And that's how she was able to connect me with so many high-value people, like the head of gastroenterology, and being able to pull those springs in order to get the bqm biototransplant.

Laura: So glad.

Joan: So glad.

Laura: Yeah, because I know people who've had to go through that with colitis and IBS and a bunch of other really serious issues. And yeah, it's no joke.

Joan: Yeah, you're on your own a lot of the times with that.

Laura: Yeah. Is there anybody else?

Heather: Well,

I'm so glad that you made it through this journey and thank you for sharing it with us. Quite a journey. Just circling back to, and I do think when people come close to, you know, when people have these life-shattering, close-to-death experiences, they do come back with the vivid insights. So yeah, I'd like you to just, if you could maybe just expand a little bit more about aligned action. Because I find sometimes there's a subtle difference between forcing yourself to do something that's just like forcing yourself to do something that you don't want to do. And maybe you shouldn't do it because maybe there's something else that would open up if you didn't force yourself to do something. And then at the same time, there are times where just doing things that are unfamiliar and foreign and scary are good. And how do we gauge the difference between that? One thing is experiential. If you get yourself to do something and then you look back and you go, "Yeah, I really didn't enjoy that. I didn't like that." That's some information. But do you have any other insights about that?

Joan: Absolutely. And this is a wonderful question. Thank you, Heather, for asking it. Because you're right. There are a lot of things that have nuance, like with talking about before, with just the subtle change in the language. This also can be a subtle change in your thinking and moving forward. So action, as we know, is moving forward in some way, shape, or form, or making an action towards something, whether it's aligned with you or not. Sometimes you find that out after the fact.

What I use kind of as a North Star there are my values. And taking a deep look at my values, which I actually have them on the wall. So that way I can always look at my core values. Things like fun and adventure, inclusivity, maximizing. So finding a good values exercise to help determine your values. And then if you do have an action, take a look at your values and compare it against them. Does it work towards what my values are? Is this something that upholds me? And then there's also other things like does this serve others? You know, how does it make me feel to do this thing? And sometimes just getting into your feelings and having that piece of information is exceptionally helpful. Other times, if you're like me and you just go out there and are like, "I'm just gonna go do that," stuff happens. But it's a really great question.Thank you for that. I hope that answered it in some way.

Heather: It’s an ongoing experience, isn't it?

Joan: I think it is for me as well. Yeah. And the other thing that I use, and this is something I've actually used all my life, and that's not recent, is if I don't do this, will I kick myself in the ass?

Heather: Right, right.

Joan: Super simple.

Heather: That’s a good one, yeah.

Laura: Yep. If I, will I be mad at myself in the morning if I've let that one go?

Joan: Yep. I like to live a life without regrets. Will I regret that? Now, regret is its own word. For me, it's very distinct. Will I kick my own ass if I don't do it?

Heather: Right, right.

Laura: Yeah. Thank you so much for doing this. You really appreciate it. It was wonderful.

Joan: Thank you for putting this together and for providing a platform for myself and for other people to talk about their experiences and just lovely to support the causes that you've put forth today. I really appreciate it.

Laura: Thank you. I think you've got great bones here for your TEDx interview.

Joan: Excellent. Now I just need to...

Laura: More poop emojis.

Joan: Get the tattoo. Get the tattoo. Fine.

Laura: I think that might be something you'd have fun with anyway.

Joan: I think so, too.

Laura: Thank you so much. And if you would like, by the way, Laura and Joan, I can hook you up with emails.

Joan: Perfect. That would be great because I need the jokes. I need the memes. Absolutely.