Episode Overview

Some seasons of life feel less like a smooth path and more like a dark little roller coaster you did not buy a ticket for.

I am recording this one from the middle of a wild stretch, and I decided to bring you along honestly, right where I am.

I share the health scare that landed me somewhere I did not plan to be, and I do not tidy any of it into a neat lesson.

What I want to talk about is the difference between believing you need fixing because you are broken, and choosing to grow because you simply want more of your life.

Your life can be a wild ride and still be one you are grateful to be on.

Resources Mentioned:

Join the Living Well After Breast Cancer Community:

https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/offers/iEbrAWpd/checkout

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Read the full transcript:

Laura Lummer 00:00
You're listening to Better Than Before Breast Cancer with the Breast Cancer Recovery Coach. I'm your host Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills, and the insights, and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis. If you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started. Hey, friends! You are listening to episode 476 of Better Than Before Breast Cancer. I felt like when I introduced the show, instead of saying "better than before, breast cancer, I should have said, "You're listening to a new episode of mr. Toad's Wild Ride. I said that to a couple of my clients over the week, and we just kind of laughed about it. And if you're not familiar with mr. Toad's Wild Ride, it's a ride in Fantasyland at Disneyland, and it's kind of funny because it's actually a ride designed for children. And if you stop and think about it, it's a very dark ride with things kind of popping out at you. It's a little bit terrifying for little children, but hey, it's a kids' ride at Disneyland. And the reason that I say is like mr. Toad's Wild Ride is this. So last week, if you're a regular podcast listener, I talked about the struggle that I was going through, and these last several months, and really these last several months have been some of the most difficult months in my life since my stage four diagnosis. So you know, I talked about that. I talked about the feelings we have about our lives compared to other people's lives, and I had pre-recorded that episode, so it came out on a Friday where I was actually meant to be traveling, which I did travel. I was traveling to Phoenix for an event called Powerhouse Women, and so I had recorded my course content from my members, my podcast, everything ahead of time, so I didn't have to think about it while I was at the Powerhouse Women event, and in fact, if you're watching this podcast on YouTube, you'll notice I have a cute little microphone that I'm deliberately using for this episode because I had purchased this, and my plan was that I would use this as as a mobile microphone. I thought, okay, cool, I can take this with me and record podcast episodes or little snippets of it live as I feel this inspiration from the Powerhouse Women's Conference. So I thought, ah, this would be such a great idea, right? I'm going to get all this inspiration, meet these people, maybe even invite some women back to my hotel room and and get their insights with my cool little new mobile microphone. Well, that didn't happen, so I'm using it today because I bought it and I haven't used it yet. But what did happen, and thank God I did have everything prepared ahead of time, because what did happen is that Monday, the Monday before I was supposed to leave, so last week, I ended up in the hospital. So I had been struggling for some time, I have what's called a pleural effusion, which is a little bit of liquid around my right lung. When I was originally diagnosed back almost six years ago now, which is wild, wild. There's another mr. Toad's wild ride, wild to me to think that this October 11th will be six years since my stage four diagnosis at that time, I had a large pleural effusion, so a lot of fluid in my chest. I had it drained a couple of times back in 2020, and I've never had a problem, but I still did have always a little bit of fluid around the bottom of that lung, and I noticed over the past few weeks that was definitely getting more severe. And I think that the catalyst to that was that I had traveled to Colorado to see my children, two of my sons, and I went to Aspen, which is a really high elevation. And I immediately noticed that struggle in catching my breath and my heart rate increasing when I was in Aspen. So, long story. I come back. I go to my oncologist. I called ahead. I said, "Hey, I need to see you.

Laura Lummer 04:02
I think that I have more fluid in my lungs. I might need what's called a thoracentesis, the process of draining that fluid out. So I go to my oncologist. My oncologist puts in an urgent request for a CT scan. This is on a Tuesday, and it's the week before, so it's the Tuesday before the week I'm leaving for my trip. By that Friday, my insurance company has still not approved the urgent CT. I call again on Monday, no approval, and now I'm thinking in my head. Well, first of all, over the weekend it had gotten worse. Now I'm really struggling to breathe. My heart rate is increased. I can't walk actually like 10 feet without having to stop and try to catch my breath. So I tell my husband on Monday, if this is not approved, I'm going to ER. I can't one. I can't live like this. I can't travel like this. But I'm I'm struggling, and it's it's. Not good for me. I need to get this fluid out of my chest, so I go into the ER, and they do an X-ray. They find quite a bit of fluid. They drain almost a liter of fluid out of my chest, which feels amazing. So much better for those of you who had to go through that process. You know what I'm saying, right? It's one of those. If you know, you know. But what happens is they put me into observation after they do something like that, a process like that, they have to watch you and do a follow up X-ray because there's a risk that you could form an air bubble that partially collapses the lung, and I've had that happen in the past. So they keep you in observation. Well, what happened when they put me in observation is they gave me a lot of intravenous Lasix, and so the Lasix, their hope was that it would get rid of any other leftover fluid that was in the body. But what was happening? It was severely dehydrating me, severely, because they gave me the Lasix. It's supposed to make you pee more and get rid of more liquid. But I wasn't peeing; I was just getting more and more dehydrated, and then they kept giving me more IV Lasix. So what happened is I ended up being in the hospital from Monday through Thursday. I was released Thursday afternoon, and we went through this whole process of thinking they were saying something was wrong with my heart because when I would stand up immediately on standing. My heart rate would go into the 160s, which is crazy high, and my blood pressure would drop. So they started doing these tests. They did echocardiogram, and at one point they said to me, "You have congestive heart failure, and I'm blown away by this. I'm like, "No, there's no way. I I know what that means. And and they were looking at what's called the ejection fraction, which is how much blood my heart is pumping out each time it contracts, and it's at 30% which they want you to be much higher than 30% And I'm thinking, I know how active I am. I I know what that would look like, and that's not me. I don't have congestive heart failure, right? This is what I'm thinking when I'm actually saying it out loud, also. And so then they say, okay, now you have to go do these other scans, something called a heart stress test, an Alexi scan. And let me tell you, a heart stress test. I had one a long time ago where they put me on a treadmill and I walked, and they measured my heart rate. This one, because of the whole situation I was in and in the hospital and had been emitted. This one consisted of giving me an injection, and they said this injection will simulate exercise in your body, and then we can test and see how your heart is responding. Well, let me tell you, if exercise felt the way that injection made me feel, I would never exercise again. That injection made me feel like I had gone through, walked around the corner in the worst haunted house experience ever, and ran into a real life Freddy Krueger. Like the injection, my body responded to it with what felt like absolute terror.

Laura Lummer 07:56
Right, my heart was racing, my legs felt weak, my arms felt weak. Like it was awful, and I'm looking at the doctor that's standing there and the NP, and I was like, "Oh my God, this is terrible! I do not like this. And I just breathe, just get through it, just get through it. So I get through it anyway. The results of that test are beautiful, perfect. Heart's functioning perfectly. So there's all this stuff going on, and multiple doctors, because if you've ever been admitted to a hospital, especially through an emergency room, you know you don't just get your doctor; you get your insurance's doctor, you get the emergency room doctor. There was all these doctors, and they hadn't communicated effectively with my oncologist, so there were other things that were falling through the cracks, and every time I'm having a conversation with a doctor, I'm hearing things and questioning them and saying, "Well, wait, that didn't happen though. You're telling me you're testing the fluid they pulled out of my lungs. They told me they threw the fluid away, and the other doctor is like, 'Oh, did they? Right? So I just felt like again, mr. Tow's wild ride, and finally, my very trusted oncologist showed up. Finally, he had been contacted, and he came in and really whipped things into shape. Helped me, got me off of the Lasix, got me on some fluids, changed the direction of everything. This is before the Lexi scan, and bottom line is, every doctor that came in, I said, "Listen, you need to figure this out. I need to be out of here at the latest Thursday afternoon. I have a huge event this weekend. I'm not missing this event. I'm flying to Phoenix Friday morning. You got to get me out of here. And they kind of would laugh at me and say, "We'll do what we can. We'll do what we can. And at one point, I said to the nurse, "I'm like, I'm leaving on Thursday. Like, I'm leaving this hospital. Whether you guys understand what's happening or not, I'm out of here. And she just kind of said, "Yeah, I really don't advise that, you know. So anyway, call it stubbornness, call it manifesting. I got out of there Thursday afternoon. So and. Up coming home Thursday afternoon, and my flight was at six a.m. on Friday morning. Now I was not feeling up to that. I definitely was not feeling up to getting everything ready, getting packed. I was still very weak. I still had a little bit of fluid around my lung, just a little bit, but just stressed from the whole event. My body was very weak, and I felt very tired. So I changed to a later flight. I went to this conference, and it was amazing. Seriously, like there's some things you go to, and when you come back, you can't explain it in a way that would convey the power of that experience. That's what powerhouse women was for me. It really was just one of those things where I I sat there meeting some amazing women, listening to amazing women, and I could just feel my heart like glowy. You know, when I went there, I promised myself and I promised my husband I'm not overdoing it. If at any point in time I feel like I have to go back to my room and take a nap, I will do that. Right? I was not going to push my body into doing what I couldn't do, and again, still struggling a little, little bit with breathing. But each day I got better, and honestly, I think that the energy and the excitement and the the camaraderie, the kinship between all of these women in this room really lent to me feeling better and improving my energy. And when I got home from the conference, my husband picked me up from the airport and he says, "I can't wait. Tell me everything. Tell me everything you learned. So my husband is a business coach as well, and he works with different companies, and he trains their sales teams, and helps with management, leadership structure, all that kind of stuff. So he said, "Tell me everything. Tell me everything you learned. And I said to him, "You know what, honey? I can't really.

Laura Lummer 11:55
And I reflected back on the fact that at the end of the conference, I went and had dinner with two of the women that I had met there at the conference, and we had a lovely dinner. One of them said, "I think that Lindsay, who's the woman who facilitates Powerhouse Women, she says, 'I think Lindsay is going to have to start bringing men into the conversation and doing this work with men. And I thought, okay, curious. Tell me why. And she was explaining how much men could value what we had experienced, how much value they could get from what we experienced. And I said, I have to push back a little bit on that because I promise you, if my husband or one of my three sons had come to that conference with me, and after 10 minutes of sitting in that room, they would have got up and walked out. My husband would have been over at the bar because it was really a women's conference. And here's what I mean by that: when my husband goes to conferences, he comes back super excited. He's got you know the video recordings of everything that happened. We'll watch them together. He'll say, "Here's what I learned about marketing. Here's what I learned about whatever strategic alignment. Here's here's what I learned, and he'll show me all these strategies. You know how powerhouse women started off? Lindsay came out on stage, and now mind you, it's it's kind of two and a half days. So the first night is like a big pajama party. It's called Pajamas and Prosecco. Super cool. There's lots of vendors. You can walk around. You can meet people, and everyone comes in their pajamas. So there's all these cute, comfy pajamas. And then Lindsay comes out and talks. But the whole idea of that first night is just so women can connect. Day two, which is actually day one of the whole conference. Everyone gets dressed up, right? So the the the dress code is wear what makes you feel like a powerhouse woman. And let me tell you, it was quite a fashion show. It was fantastic. And so up leading up to it, Lindsay shares the story that she says, so many people were trying to guess what I was going to wear. They're like, oh, I kind of have an idea. I think I know what you're going to come out in. And she says, and I would say, I don't think you do, because what she came out in was yoga pants and a t-shirt, barefoot and bare-faced, no makeup, right? So this big event that God only knows the energy and the effort she put in. She's a team of two, her and her assistant. The effort, the energy that it took to put this conference together, and then to show up in a room of 600 women who are dressed to the nines, right, in their powerhouse outfits, barefaced and barefooted, in black yoga pants and a black T-shirt. And what was the point of that? It was that the whole conference was about showing up as you, right? Being your authentic self, being the most real version of you, and loving it. That that's the foundation of all other things. Does that sound familiar? If you're one of my members or you're a woman I've coached, that's going to sound familiar because it's the foundation of what I teach, because it's what I learned as a part of my healing is loving yourself. Now it doesn't mean that oh if you put on makeup or you get dressed up you're not being authentic. No, that's a version of me. That's a version of me that I love. I love makeup. I love anything that sparkles. I love an opportunity to get dressed up. In fact, when I saw Powerhouse Women months and months ago, and I saw the videos from previous ones, and the dancing and the all dressed. Oh my God! I said that's a that's a conference for me. But that being said, I love myself when I show up with no makeup. You know, there's many videos of me on my social media where I just feel inspired to talk about something, and I just show up, no makeup, my hair up in a hat or a bun or whatever, because I'm confident in myself.

Laura Lummer 16:07
I love myself, and that's my face. You know, that's my face. Take it or leave it. And sometimes I like to dress up my face, and sometimes I like to dress up my body. But if I choose not to, I'm comfortable with that anyway, right? When I am coaching women, and this is why I think that this wouldn't resonate with men. We think so differently, and it isn't for us. Like, how do I make something happen? Right? If you want to clean out your room, redecorate your house, remodel the kitchen, go on a trip. Any of the things you want. It isn't so much the tactics. We have to have tactics. Obviously, we have a plan. We have budgets. All of those. But we have to believe we deserve it. We have to believe we're worth it. We have to believe we have the capacity for it. We have to learn to trust ourselves. We have to learn to listen to our intuition. And every single woman that got up on that stage, many of them very, very successful business women, entrepreneurs, very successful. They didn't talk about strategy. No, they talked about how they had to overcome themselves, how they had to trust their own voice, how they had to stand up in rooms and meetings and circumstances where they normally would have kept themselves quiet, and some of them talked about how they built businesses the way that they are taught by men to build businesses, male coaches, or in the world of business, the way traditionally businesses are built by an entrepreneur, and then how they said, you know what? And I hated my business, so I burned it to the ground, and I aligned it with myself, my life, my purpose, my emotions, and I rebuilt it, and now I love it, and I love my life, and it's a part of my life, and I just love showing up as me every day, and that is the point, friends. Aligning your life as women, that purpose-driven, that emotional alignment, that this feels right for me. I'm not forcing myself, and I'm not trash talking men at all, or the way men do business. I'm just pointing out that it is different. And when I was having that conversation with my husband, when he said, "Tell me everything, and I said, "I can't, and here's why, and I started to describe to him how the conference started off, how when we would come back from lunch we had a lady leading a breathwork session, how we would do squats up and down while we're pulling energy in, we're putting our hands out, we're yanking our hands back, and we're pulling energy in, and we're saying, "I receive, right? I'm willing to receive, right? And I'm willing to release. And my husband is looking at me. He's like, "Yeah, no, I'm not doing that, right? But in that room full of women, it was very powerful, and I think it's a beautiful thing to acknowledge that femininity, that difference in ourself that is still so freaking powerful, right? Women are powerful creatures, and when we allow ourselves to be authentically us, to align ourselves, our life, our energy, whatever we're doing in the work in our life, in the relationships in our life, when we allow ourselves to show up with love, show up for ourselves. This is what I'll tell my clients when they come to me, and a lot of times, you know, I'll ask them like, "What do you want in this situation? What does this mean to you? And I'll hear, "I don't know. I'm not sure. And so we work on clarity. Because we've got to get to a point of clarity, we've got to know what we want before we can show up for ourselves, and we can show up for ourselves bare face. We can show up to ourselves in boas and glitters, but we've got to be the ones to decide. I know what I want, and I'm going to show up for myself and be open to whatever path you know whatever the path looks like, and even if I do something wrong, you know that I judge is wrong.

Laura Lummer 20:29
Even if it's difficult, even if it isn't what I thought it would be or wanted it to be, I love myself enough to show up for me, and to be bold enough to say this is me, right? Take it or leave it. This is my face, and it's okay. Show up for your life with love for yourself, and that doesn't mean, you know, narcissism or something like that. It means compassion. It means treating ourselves with compassion. It means dropping the judgment, it means knowing that you're worthy enough and you're good enough exactly as you are. And this is the thing: there was this awesome lady. She was a photographer, and she had done a photo session with Lindsay for this conference, and they showed a video that they did. It was it was remarkable, but she starts to talk and she says, "I'm in a room. She has a beautiful British accent. She's, "I'm in a room of 600 women, and I've never been in a room of 600 men who are working on themselves. Why are we always working on ourselves? Why do you think you're not good enough? And you know, there were smiles, there were giggles. Sometimes nervous giggles. But also, I think the important thing, as she began to speak, the evolution was this: there's a difference between growth and investing in yourself for that growth, for expansion, and also on the opposite side, thinking you're not good enough, right? That you have to work on yourself to be good enough, and so I think it's really important for us to understand. Just like this is my face, and I can wear it just as it is, or I can dress it up with makeup if I choose to. Just like that is the fact that I can show up as I am now in my life, and loving my life right now, like saying I have a good life right now, and I'm open to more expansion, and I want to learn more. I want to grow more, right? So I love my life right now. I love my life right now, but I feel this calling. I have something in me that says I have a capacity for more. I want to reach more women. I want to reach more women who have had a breast cancer diagnosis. I want to work with them and give them my message that says it's okay. You're okay. You can have a life you love that's even better than before breast cancer, right? You can love your life now, or maybe you can be uncomfortable in your life now, but it's okay to grow from there. Loving yourself now exactly where you start, right? We're not broken. There's nothing wrong with us. It really is a pet peeve of mine when I go to different conferences and stuff, and people say like, "I know you feel broken, and I'm like, "No, no, I don't feel broken, right? Even if I'm going through a struggle like mr. Toad's wild ride, I've been going through some medical issues since March. In fact, as I'm sitting here talking with you right now, I cannot move my right arm. I literally cannot move it. I can pick it up with my left hand. Other than that, it is completely paralyzed for lack of a better situation. I'm dealing with doctors. I'm trying to get into a spinal specialist. I know it's coming from a compression of my cervical spine. It does not feel good. It is uncomfortable, but I still have a business that I love, and I'm still going to show up for it, and I'm still going to believe in my healing. I'm still going to take care of myself the way I am, but I'm also desiring that expansion, good and bad, at the same time, all the time in this mr. Toad's wild ride, crazy version of life. And people will say to me, "You're so disciplined. You're so brave. And I think I'm. I'm not. I'm not. I just love me, and I love my life. I love me in the sense that I love me enough to take care of myself, right? I show up making the choices I make for food because I love this body and I want it to feel good.

Laura Lummer 24:33
I go to bed really early because I love the way my body feels when I go to bed early. I love to wake up early because I love to see the sunrise. I love to be able to work out because my body feels good, and I love to have that all done first thing in the morning, right? I do things out of love for myself. So why am I sitting here with a numb arm doing a podcast? Because I love my podcast. And when I do things I love and help me feel good, they take my mind off of physical discomfort, but they also help me believe in my future. Right? I I feel I must be able to believe and have hope in what's coming next for me, for my health, for my healing. I must know that yes, there are setbacks, and I don't know what's going to come of the setbacks. All I know is what I have today, and today I know this: my arm won't move, but I'm managing the discomfort. I'm working on all of the appointments that I need to get, and all of the data I need for all the people who need to see it, and I'm continuing on showing up as me, the person who loves to share insights with other women, who hopes that other women find hope from those insights, and a woman who, gosh, talks a lot. So here I am, bare-faced, sharing with you my mr. Toad's wild ride of a life, because I know I'm not the only one on that ride, and that's why I wanted to share this with you. I know I don't, and I don't even know why do we expect life to be smooth. When have we ever had that? Like little moments of it, maybe here and there. But for the most part, we know life is a wild ride, and sometimes, even when it's dark and we're terrified, and it's going down into the the most terrifying thing, and your stomach is in your heart is like in the pit of your stomach. Even on a roller coaster, excitement exists at the same time as that terror, and I think that's the same thing with life. I still have excitement, hope, passion, purpose, and I have shit going down that I really don't like at all, and that's concerning for me, right? Both things at the same time, but the point is, I don't show up trying to be someone I'm not. I don't show up trying to pretend that I feel something that I don't. I show up saying, "This is me. I want to live a life of alignment, a life of connection. I want to surround myself with powerful women, and I don't mean powerful like you know lobbyists or something like that. I mean connected to themselves, internal power and energy, knowing who they are, and showing up as them. Right? No masks on, nothing to prove, being themselves because that's the most powerful version of us, and it's the version I want to be, and it's the version of other people that I want to be around. All the flaws, all the this, all the that. When people say to me, "I know it's crazy, it isn't crazy. Your thoughts aren't crazy. Your feelings aren't invalid. They just are. And the more we can get to that point where we're like, this is me, and this is what I'm feeling right now. This is me, and this is what I'm needing right now, and it's okay, all of it, because it just is, and it's just true. And you shouldn't be somewhere else by now. You shouldn't have something else by now. But you can always sit here and say, but I want more. Fantastic! It's kind of like a gratitude practice, right? We have to be grateful before we're open to receive. Like if I have my car as a clunker, and every day I get in my clunker car and like I hate this clunker car. That's really not an energy of openness to receive, right? It's not an energy of love and obviously of gratitude and openness. But if I get in my clunker car that gets me to where I need to be, and I say, I'm so glad that I have this car.

Laura Lummer 28:34
I'm so glad I have a car that gets me from point A to B, and I'm open to the Range Rover coming into my life as well, right? That's what I'm talking about here. That's the message I'm taking away from powerhouse women. We are here right now. We are good enough right now, and we get to choose expansion if that's what's calling to us. So thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting me through mr. Toad's Wild Ride. I do put stuff out on Instagram, and I got so much support and so much love. And if you don't follow me there, you can find me as the Breast Cancer Recovery Coach or on Facebook, Laura Lummer, the Breast Cancer Recovery Coach, and DM me. Not only that, but come and join my Living Well After Breast Cancer community. You can find it on my website. I'll link to it here, where you're listening to or watching this podcast. And this is a free community for women who have had a breast cancer diagnosis and want to build a life that's better than before breast cancer. So come and join, participate in the conversation, share your thoughts and ideas, and the things that help you have a life that's better than before breast cancer. All right, friends. I'll talk to you next week, and until then, be good to yourself, and expect other people to be good to you as well. Take care.