Lisa Greinert: Who the Hell am I? How vomiting changed my life.

It is time to tell listeners where I am on my writing journey since that is why I started the podcast. If you've never attempted to write your story, you might be interested in hearing how mine has been going since starting my writing in 2022. You'll see I never made it past the vomit stage but boy did I learn a few things about myself. I'm here if you need to vomit, too.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to another How to Write a book from A to Z podcast. I am Lisa Greinert, your podcast host. I am doing something excruciating for the new year. and boy is it a doozy, but it was what I needed to vomit. So in case you're not aware, writers sometimes call their first draft their vomit draft, and that's basically what I've been doing since 2022. Is vomiting and my writing hasn't gotten any further than that stage, but boy did I find out some stuff about me. Holy moly. What happened is nothing, what I thought was going to happen. As I wrote, I actually ended up finding myself. I, I didn't know who I was. So as I tell some of my story, I want you to think. Do you know who you are and why you do what you do? Why that person makes you angry? Why you want to go shopping, why what somebody does, causes you to be defensive? Why that feeling in your gut that you don't listen to is telling you what you need to know? There is no way I could tell you my story just in this one episode, but I think there are two comments that have stayed with me through this writing journey that I think really sums up my life. One dear friend who I've shared lots of. Things about my life with said one day looking me straight in the eye. Lisa, you have a story to tell. You need to tell your story. So that was in the back of my mind and had been for a while. And the second was when a friend, same thing, looked at me with Dear Sweet Eyes. And said, Lisa, if anyone should feel like a victim, it should be you. My entire career was people, that's all I've ever done is work with people, people in trouble, people in pain, people hurting, and I listened And you know what? I felt their pain. I knew it because it is something that I had felt before. So I wonder if, you know, going through things early in your life and already feeling, you know, pain and hurt and suffering, somehow it binds you to people because you feel them and you recognize them. I am an excellent reader of people, just obviously not myself. How can you help others when you don't even recognize why you're feeling the way you're feeling or doing what you're doing? why is it that I am in my sixties and I am just now realizing who I am? There is no excuse for not teaching young people to recognize their own thoughts and feelings and understand them. I should have known how to help people, but first and foremost. I needed someone to tell me and teach me how to become self-aware when I was young. It would've made a world of difference, all this junk inside of me. I may have learned how to get out instead of keeping it so completely compacted inside my body for 50 years. Isn't that probably the biggest issue with our world right now is we spend so much time blaming others when we don't spend any time looking at who we are and what role we play in the lives of others and in our own life. I never thought about why I did anything. I don't know. Maybe you did, maybe you learned, but I didn't. I just floated through my little life, like one of those little puppy dogs that follows you right? Wanting to be friends and wanting people to love them. That's probably the best way to sum up how I lived my life. I needed people. That was important to me. I don't know why, but I know it brought me joy. I always have loved people from the minute I entered the world in Ville Platte, Louisiana at the Ardoin Sanatorium. I mean, that alone should have probably told me. What my life might've been like My journey has been long. My journey has been hard which is why I needed to write this book. There were things that I refused to get out, refused to talk about, that just laid dormant inside of me. And then in May, 2022, I was basically told to stop. Stop moving, stop going. Stop chasing, stop everything because of something that happened to me. Looking back at my life, I didn't get here on my own. I promise you that. I tell people I could just as easy be living in a trailer and backwoods Louisiana with 10 kids, but that's not how my life happened. I hope what I'm about to say doesn't automatically turn people off because it shouldn't. What I'm going to say is what happened to me truly had to have been a spiritual experience. Somebody took me down a direction, thank God, and that's who I'm going to thank for doing so because no matter how crazy this sounds, I know that he's the one that forced me to start telling, to start to get my story out because it literally had been causing health issues. I know that now. Your body deals with things, and if you don't get it out, it's just inside creeping into all those little spaces and causing issues, which is really what happened to me. During lovely COVID, I was diagnosed with an unruptured brain aneurysm and had brain surgery. I truly believe now as I've had this opportunity to reflect back on this thing called my life, that it was stress related. I kept my pain inside for so long that. It was wreaking havoc inside my body. And the thing is, I know that I'm not alone because of what I mentioned, just working with people that were hurt and in pain for so long, but unable to recognize nice that the way we handle struggles and pain and hurt and anger. Is the problem. We don't know how to, so it all comes out in weird and strange ways. I mean, I just feel that that's gotta be it. We don't know selves. We all know that health issues our choices and what we do affects us, right? So high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, so many of these are related to how well we've taken care of ourselves. So doesn't it make sense that the things that weigh you down without you even really recognizing they weigh you down because you've been carrying them for so long, that maybe they're doing something inside of you that is causing this whole homeostasis. Imbalance. This whole balance that we have to have in our body in order to maintain good health and mental and physical wellbeing, it's outta whack, your body is telling you something. So when your brain's outta whack and your body's acting up. There could be a direct correlation between I firmly believe that that was part of my issue. I wasn't releasing what needed to be let go of, it was mine. It didn't belong to anybody else. Boy, what a mistake. You are about to hear how God stopped me in my tracks and forced me to start talking, to start getting it out because what happened was an accident, but weirdly, I wonder. Not that I think that God would do anything specifically to cause pain, but I do believe now that he has ways of stopping our own madness, forcing us to pay attention to look at who we are, what we've done. And why? So we all have our stories of COVID. I mean, it's almost like it didn't really even happen now. Weird. So my COVID story was that I'm diagnosed with this unruptured aneurysm and I end up going into surgery, within the week. And this amazing neurosurgeon was able to insert through my groin, a tube and inside the tube, he just strung seven titanium wires from my groin all the way up to that little center of my brain to compact my little bubble hanging out there, so that the blood would flow past it. And I would be blessed with not having it burst at some point during my life, and it went very smooth. I could not have asked for an easier experience based on the trauma of having brain surgery, but it's what happened one and a half years later that I called my hell. I go in for my checkup, which is another angiogram, and the doctor inserts the tube into my groin, and as he takes it out the little, tiny little hole would not close. 45 minutes later after the nurses were like, doctor, do you want me to compress the, he was like, no. He just stood there with me and once he felt the hole was closed, I go off to recovery. My blood pressure's high, but not too bad, and I end up going home, but severe headache. End up back in the emergency room, they get my blood pressure down. I'm home. So before I get in bed that lovely day, I notice that my knee hurts. And again, not thinking anything of it, I go to bed. I get up. Leg hurts. The doctor called and checked on me, Hey, you know, my leg hurts. You know, is, is, could there be an issue? And when I explained where it hurt, he's like, I don't think that there's a connection. In the meantime, my leg slowly stopped working. It happened to be the week of my husband's retirement party, 37 years in the same place. His retirement party's in Dallas on a Thursday. My checkup was on the Monday. Thursday, we are driving to Dallas and I'm on a crutch. I get a call from my doctor and he's like, Hey, I think you might wanna go in and see a vascular surgeon. I've been talking to him, and you need to really get in tomorrow, which is Friday. So five days since. I called the doctor's office, and I'm sure none of you have ever had this experience. I'm like, Hey, my brain surgeon said that I need to make an appointment for tomorrow. And obviously the front office had not heard that I was supposed to come in and she was like, oh no, my doctor does not do that quick of appointments. You'll have to wait. So puts me on hold. Comes back. I can get you in on Monday. I'm like, okay, I guess my brain surgeon's wrong. Ironically, my husband actually wasn't retiring until that Monday at 5:00 PM which was the actual 37 years later. So the appointment was set for three 30 and our plan still was at five o'clock to be at a nice fancy restaurant drinking a glass of wine. Cheering to his actual retirement, but that didn't happen. At three 30. I drag my leg in to the ultrasound I'm hooked up. They do the ultrasound on my leg, takes about 45 minutes. Randy, my husband is with me. We walk into the doctor's office who I've never met, and the doctor looks at me and says, I have no good news for you. And he's staring at me and he says, how the hell are you still walking? I'm stunned, and then he continues. I have a room for you at ICU. I need you to go immediately. I mean, here I am thinking I was about to have my glass of wine. I was all excited about that. What the hell? So obviously you do, you know what they say? I really have no concept. This is going to kind of tell you about my life and how I think about me, because I guess I just don't. I handled it like I do with everything in my life. I pull on my big girl panties and I get through it. I don't think about it. I don't dwell on it. I didn't even look up how a brain surgeon does brain coiling techniques it doesn't help the cause. I'm tough I ended up going to the hospital, going into ICU and connected to 5 million. Pieces of wire and a contraption that squeezes my leg. Obviously the thought was that it was a blood clot. So I'm like, it's a whirlwind, you know? What. What is going on? So I end up there for the next three and a half days as they try to figure out what is happening with my leg. So my leg I now know was almost dead. I had had no blood flow to my leg since the Monday before. However. No one knew why. So for the next few days, every 24 hours, the doctor was doing another angiogram, instead of going to my brain, going to my knee to see what was going on and why there was no flow. In the meantime, my leg is dying. I don't know if you've ever had a bit of frostbite or anything like that, but I will tell you there's a reason I call this my hell when your appendage is dying. Well, it just, it ain't good. So I am screaming. I am one of the people in ICU. That sounds like a crazy person. And then every day the vascular surgeon would walk in and would say, I don't know what it is. The third day he walks in he starts to explain what he thinks may have happened. When they do angiograms, some doctors use a plug called an angio plug, and that plug plugs up the tiny little hole and. Here's where no one's agreeing. My vascular surgeon and brain surgeon don't know. All I know is that I was in the middle of hell and no one knew why. They figure what happened was a piece of the plug had un lodged, a defective plug and had gone and lodged itself in the popal vein artery. I always get it confused, sorry. So it lodges so that it literally stops all blood flow from below my knee on. So my vascular surgeon did his very first knee stint. He had the representative from the knee stent company in the surgery as he did it. He mentioned later that he had never seen anything like it in the over 20 years that he had been performing surgery. So that is basically where I am. He put in the stent and I thought that I was in pain before, but that was even worse because you can only imagine when a part of your body is about to die and then all of a sudden it gets this surge of blood that it has been missing for seven days. It is unlike any experience I'd ever had. I refused to take anything I'd probably love whatever the heck they gave me. I mean, that's the truth. I mean, sounds like it's probably pretty good. That's the scary thing. That's why you never try, right? So I made it through and then I came home. It was the next morning that changed everything because I woke up the next morning and Randy was in his study and I remember getting out of bed, having never felt this low in my life,. I was tired. I was tired. The brain surgery, the leg was just the end of some trauma that I had never had time to even pay attention to, nor want to. There were secrets that I hadn't told anyone. There was a lot inside that I was embarrassed by. Humiliated by ashamed of that I refuse to let go of. Anyone who says that your health and your mental wellbeing isn't connected, I am living proof. That that is untrue because'cause of what happened is what started me to understand who the hell I am. I do believe that knee stint was just a sucky accident. Who knows who's to blame, but I'm not going down that road. There's too much it happened. Move on. As I get up that morning after the knee stint and I'm shuffling to Randy, I have no feeling, no nothing. My head is drooped down. I, I don't know. I just don't know what to do. So I walk in there and my amazing husband sees me and gets up and puts me in his wonderful arms, the bear hug that I love, and he just gently squeezes me. And there had to have been 10,000 tears that he. Pushed out of what felt like my soul. I just released so much So of course he's like, what the hell? I'm sure. And he leads me to our couch and he lays me down and he, I have my head in his lap and I, you know, the tears are still going on. After a while, I've, I've slowed down and he says, what can I do? And no thought came to my mind. All I said was, I need you to leave. So he gave me a kiss and got his things and left the house. So why I told him that, your guess is as good as mine. I just did. So I'm laying there feeling like a victim, feeling sorry for myself, asking God, like, we all do. Why? Why me? Why, why, why? Right? There comes a point where you just wanna know the truth. You wanna know answers. Because why are some people's lives such a struggle while others don't seem so much? I know that we all have our struggles. I guarantee that, but for some reason it appears that some of us just somehow, I don't know, things happen. I felt like I had reasons to feel like, you know, sorry for myself. So I'm like laying there going, okay, I have no earthly idea where to go from here. This is where the crazy comes in, but I promise you it's real. I'm by myself. All of a sudden a voice from nowhere. And remember, I didn't have any drugs, so I wasn't under any drug induced behavior. I hear get up and write, and since I'm not thinking I'm crazy, I'm thinking. What just happened, there is no way that I just heard this voice. There's no way. So I don't do anything and I just continue to lay there and, I don't know what I'm thinking. Just laying there and then the voice, because obviously I didn't listen the first time. Says get up and write. So I thought, well, obviously there's someone trying to tell me something. So I get my laptop, and that was three years ago when I started writing my story and what I found out. By telling my story, by getting it out was beyond anything I would've ever thought. Get rid of it. So there it is. There is the beginning of me telling you my story, but starting at the end because I think that you can all relate. Can you relate to what I've said? I would love to know.