From "It's Nothing" to "It's Cancer" - My 10 Year Celebration of Sinking, Swimming, and Fully Living

In this deeply personal solo episode, I’m sharing the 10-year anniversary story of my cancer diagnosis—what I now call my diagnosiversary—and how it shaped the entire ethos behind Sink & Swim.

Before cancer, I was the poster child for Western medicine and performance-based success: top of my PT class, working with elite athletes, constantly striving to optimize, fix, and keep swimming. But my body had other plans.

This episode unpacks the full descent—from panic attacks to mystery illnesses, orthorexia masked as wellness, and years of doctors telling me “it’s nothing” about a mass in my lung that turned out to be cancer. But more than that, it’s a story of intuition, identity unraveling, and finally learning to listen—not just to symptoms, but to the soul story underneath.

For anyone who’s ever been gaslit by medical providers, questioned their identity as a healthcare professional, or chased health info like it’s a job—this episode is a reckoning, a reclamation, and a love letter to your inner knowing.

0:00:00 – The Real Reason I Started Sink & Swim
0:10:59 – When Science Was My Scripture
0:24:12 – Candida, Panic, & the Descent
0:38:34 – “It’s Not Cancer”… Until It Was
0:52:47 – Trusting the Whisper Over the Protocol
1:10:26 – The 10-Year Mark & Redefining Aliveness
1:24:01 – From Fixing to Listening — In My Coaching Work, Too

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Transcript

Julie Granger (00:58)

Welcome back to Sink and Swim. I'm really pumped about this episode because it has a lot of really personal meaning for me, not to mention the story in this episode is the reason the Sink and Swim concept ever developed in my heart. And it was a concept, it was a way of being.

that has lived in my heart for what I can now say is a decade. it's only recently that I was able to put words around it and give it the name Sink and Swim. But this particular episode feels so important to me to do and record because it's really the birthplace of this podcast.

It's the cry for why for why I'm even here interviewing people, telling stories, telling truths, revealing what being an authentic, fully expressed human really is all about. Sharing the unfiltered parts of what that is, inviting people to bring their untamed, unpolished

parts to the table and just make humaneness great again. And I'm, it took me a long time to actually sit down and write myself some notes on what I wanted to share in this episode.

And that's what really this is about celebrating the 10 year anniversary of being diagnosed with cancer and anyone who has gone through cancer treatment themselves or has lived alongside someone who has been there and done that knows the way that

cancer is classified is by your diagnosis date in terms of what they might call your survivorship.

timeline. I don't know if that's the actual term for it, but that's what we're going to call it. So I realized that maybe the reason I have done 10 episodes of this podcast without ever really sitting down and talking through the why of it was because it's possible my soul was telling me to wait to tell the story.

in the frame of my 10-year cancer diagnosis anniversary or what I call my diagnosiversary Because it's not that it's hard to tell the story. I've told the story so many times. I'm very comfortable talking about it. But I think it's because that 10-year moment is

actually an inflection point. And it is rooted in the logistics of how I am treated as a patient in the oncology world, in that if you are blessed enough to make it to the 10-year survivor timeline, then you get the choice, and this is maybe not the case for everyone who makes it there, but you get the choice to basically graduate from yearly...

checkups that are pretty involved. And what that looks like and has looked like for me for the last five years is getting a yearly CT scan of my chest, abdomen, and my pelvis where I have to drink the nasty drink and fast. And it's a whole thing. I also now, since we moved to North Carolina, I have to travel down to Atlanta to get that done

And I have this real intuitive knowing that I don't belong there anymore. because it just doesn't fit my life anymore. I'm healthy. I'm fully alive.

I am like the healthiest cancer patient there is at the oncology office, which I'm so grateful to be able to say and also just really recognizing that I don't belong there. And continuing to put myself into that world feels like

It feels unnecessary

and I see the alchemy in the entire story.

spoiler of this entire episode, I really see the cancer journey as one of the greatest gifts I've ever received. It continues to reveal gifts to me in ways that I never would have expected, especially now at the 10-year mark, and I've been doing a lot of reflection. I...

as much as I could have done without all of the pain and the trauma and everything that came through it, it's really one of those phoenix rising from the ashes types of situations where I'm not gaslighting the pain, I'm rising from it. And that is the essence of Sink and Swim is when we really allow ourselves to fully sink into some of the hardest.

moments of our lives that's where we find the

magical hidden doorways to our greatest rise. You have to sink in order to fully swim. And I feel myself even tearing up saying that. So it's one of those things that I know is so true on the soul level to acknowledge and also acknowledge all of the parts of me that went through that.

in a way where I was, I don't want to say there wasn't fear, but there was definitely a lot of courage and a lot of willingness to walk through some really, really deep, difficult moments. And I don't even mean that on the level of like my health and my body.

But it has really become

an instrumental turning point in what I would call my life story.

With this episode, I want to lead with a couple of caveats, as I typically do when I do solo episodes and I'm sharing a personal story and a personal journey because there's a lot of well-meaning people out there on the internet who can take stories and unintentionally twist our vulnerable moments in all sorts of different ways.

they're going to be parts of my story, that I share that may feel hard to hear, they may feel triggering, or you might downright disagree with some things I say. And that's okay. I'm okay with that. I'm not here to convince anyone or change your mind on the oncology industry or the medical industry or how someone should or shouldn't go through a deeply life-changing medical experience. That's not what this is about.

This is really to share the why behind the concept of sink and swim. I also already mentioned this, but I'm going to say it again is I wouldn't share any of this if I hadn't processed it or worked through things with professional help.

I'm aware that people mean really well when you might reach out and feel bad for me or say, my gosh, I'm so sorry you went through that, or want to tell me how brave and how strong and how courageous I am. And it's not that, first of all, that comes from a bad place or that it's not true.

It's that This is my lived experience. And I have a friend who pointed out to me something about a year ago, the concept of inspiration porn, which if you don't know what that is, go look it up. It's not the scope of this episode or my place to really define it out and teach it to you. But when we're on looking someone else's experience,

and someone else's story that sparked something moving in us, emotional, vulnerable, your own humanity. And there are brave parts and there are courageous parts and there are hard parts. It can turn into a bit of entertainment where you can't get enough and you wanna keep drinking it up and asking questions and learning more. And or if you're a super empath like me and you're very compassionate.

you might identify with certain parts of my story and wanna reach out and like give me support around it. And I love that, I love that, thank you for doing that. And just know that I'm not sharing this as a means of seeking support. The best support you can do is share this story with your audience, with your friends,

Other little caveats, because my audience, my industry, my world is like 90 % medical people.

I see you all listening. I'm definitely not sharing any of this in hopes of receiving unsolicited medical advice, wellness advice, things to do moving forward, not looking for health coaching, not looking for life coaching. Again, I have my own support team for all of that.

Another caveat is I am not sharing any of this story as a representative of the entire population of people with cancer. I couldn't possibly have that amount of power. And so what that means is my experience is by no means the same as the experience of any other person who's gone through a cancer experience. And every experience is so fundamentally different. And I would...

probably argue that every person who actually lives through it or lives adjacent to someone living through it knows that's true. So there's nothing here for me to convince you of or sway you on. If you've had a different experience or someone had a very different experience than mine, good, that's what I would expect.

And most importantly, and this is something that I'll actually go over in a part two of this episode in a couple of weeks, is sharing the story doesn't make cancer a part of my identity. It doesn't make it part of my purpose.

The truth is this is an important part of my story, very important part of my story. But I'm not a cancer patient. Cancer is not the story. It doesn't define me.

a

So this isn't a cautionary tale about cancer. This isn't a discussion about what to do and what not to do as a patient yourself. It's not really a medical conversation, although it circles around a medical situation. All right. So the segments we'll go through in today's episode are the before. So I'm going to paint the picture for you of really what led to cancer. These are questions people ask me all the time, like,

wait, what was going on? How did you know you even had it? Because it's actually a quite interesting story. And then we'll talk about really getting into the nitty gritty details of the time surrounding when I was diagnosed. It was just an incredibly physically and emotionally turbulent time in my life. So turbulent. And then...

10 years later after diagnosis.

what the top lesson or lessons are that I learned just from the lead up and the turbulent time to the diagnosis, You'll have to sit on the edge of your seat in suspense and find out what treatment actually looked like.

The last section will talk about really how this integrates into not just starting this podcast but how I've really redefined my identity and my purpose, because it very much has informed my work, especially because I am a medical provider who went through a life altering medical situation that not only

changed the way that I operate from a health perspective, but also changed the way that I operate from a professional perspective. And while I've talked about some of those parts, I maybe haven't done it in this context before. And perhaps some of my philosophies on approaching

my both former identity as healthcare provider and my role in serving other healthcare providers will start to make a little bit more sense based on this part of the story. All right, let's talk about the lead up to the turbulent time of diagnosis. And it actually really starts when I was a kid. I always wanted to be a physician.

had a doctor's kit as a kid. I was fascinated when family members were in the hospital and we'd go visit them. And I was like, ooh, this place is interesting. I managed to have lots of mystery unicorn illnesses as a kid and a teen, one of which in kindergarten kept me out of kindergarten for like a month. Might have been longer than that, might have been shorter than that. At least in my memory, it was a month. But.

I always wanted to be a doctor. And so being in and out of the doctor's office a lot

for better or worse being sick only fueled the dream. And it wasn't like, There's this fascination with the human body in general. One of my favorite books as a kid was The Magic School Bus.

inside the human body. Like the pictures of Mrs. Frizzle driving the bus through the blood vessels and all those things. I can still see it. I can smell the book. I was obsessed with it. And when I

combined that with another huge part of childhood, which was being a highly, highly competitive swimmer. You combine this zeal, this curiosity, this intensity, which is just my personality. And then you combine athlete mentality. And like the idea of being a physician was my absolute dream goal.

It was like a sport in addition to the swimming sport that I did. And in swimming, you my mentality was Sink or swim. Using the quote from Dory from Finding Nemo, just keep swimming all the time and did anything to stay at the top, not only the surface of the pool, literally, but the top of swimming ranks, locally, across the state, the country, all of those things.

This very, very talented young swimmer. And that started to even derail itself once I was in high school. Injuries came up, illnesses came up, and it challenged that sink or swim mentality because injuries equal sinking, when you combine that with this curiosity about medicine, about the body,

it only fueled it more and it shifted sink or swim to sink then swim. So I'll sink, that's fine. I can go through illness, but I will rise back up. I will be that Phoenix rising from the ashes.

At that time, sinking and swimming were still polar, diabolical enemies of each other, So was sort of like swimming was the thing that I got back from this horrible sinking thing that I went through. But by the way, while I was sinking in that illness or that injury, I was learning all these things about the body.

Well, all of this combined after college when I went to physical therapy school. So I shifted from being a pre-med to pre-physical therapy. I know that's a common story for a lot of people in the PT world. Give me a shout if that's the story for you too. And I continued that sink or swim mentality. PT became my new sport. All of that intensity, all that curiosity just continued right on.

And I also combined it with the actual athlete mentality and graduated top of my class from one of the top medical training programs in the country and immediately went into sports medicine, working with swimmers. Shocker, right? And so that's sort of the before, just painting you the picture of my personality. And I stopped at nothing to just keep swimming and stay at the top.

of not only my sport, not only my curiosity of being very good at what I did, but also then putting those things together and creating a whole profession out of it. And, you know, within two years of graduating from physical therapy school, I was sort of a sought after sports medicine provider. I was teaching in PT school. I was writing books. I was publishing research papers. Honestly, it was the whole freaking gamut of things. I was speaking on big stages. was, my God, you guys, it was insane.

Not to mention I'd taken every course there was. I couldn't stop learning. I wanted to learn everything. And again, that was me. A lot of that was purely me. And what I can say now, looking back on it, was it was also a coping mechanism for a lot of things we don't have time to unpack in this episode. But ultimately, what ended up happening was that just keep swimming, just keep staying at the top.

mentality was born and solidified all while getting my identity and my purpose completely tangled up with all of those parts of the story. When I look back on it, I really see this beautiful, ambitious, curious, multi-dimensional being with all these different parts on the inside driving. And there was this

inner, lots of inner parts. do Internal Family Systems work as part of my coaching work with my clients. And there is this one part that I've named her Dr. Christina Yang, if you've seen Grey's Anatomy, who was maybe a little too intense with needing to be the best. And it's not that I was necessarily competitive with other people. I've always been

stayed in my own lane, that's like a very swimming thing to do. I was competitive with myself. generally I was very focused on my own race and just wanted to see how far I could excel. can I raise the bar a little more, a little more, a little more? It was definitely a moving target. And when that also got my identity tangled up in it,

It was very difficult for me, whether it was the doctors I was seeing for my own medical mystery illnesses that were going on, or whether it was me becoming one myself, whether it was my mentors professionally who were these amazing medical providers, my identity was tangled in with wanting to be just like them and having them on a pedestal and

That happened from a very, very young age when that curious girl who loved the Magic School Bus book was like, ooh, this is interesting. And anything that my medical team, my providers, my physical therapists that I worked with over the years said was gospel to me. I just drank it in. Everything was gospel.

what ended up happening with always swim, swim, swim, swim, swim, keep learning, keep growing, keep rising, keep following these people that you have on pedestals was I learned so much about medicine and about the human body and how to not only help it heal, but also how to control it.

And again, I'm saying all that looking back on it. And ultimately what I learned in my time as a young, vulnerable patient moving into someone who's now working with patients was I learned how to quiet the signals of my body or control them, keep them under wraps.

so that I could just keep swimming, whether that was professionally helping other people. So I learned to quiet my own body signals so I could give to others. Very common trend in the health care industry. If you want to hear more on that, go back to episode 10 and listen to my conversation with Dr. Jessica DeJarnette. We really dug into that.

but ultimately in my zeal to just keep swimming.

I didn't learn how to truly Sink and listen. Body signal symptoms were seen as something to fix, to heal, to quiet, to alleviate, to manage, to wrap up and tape, whether it was kinesio tape or leukotape or taping an ankle so that you could just keep going. It's very athlete mentality. It's not only athlete mentality, it's sink or swim mentality. So that's the first part.

just to paint you the picture of the before. Ultimately, it's like I believed in medicine and science like it was scripture.

And that brings us to the topsy-turvy time leading to diagnosis. So I was diagnosed at 31 in 2015. I'm recording this now in August 2025. So 10 years ago, it was August 2015. To give you some context, I was six years into my physical therapy career at this point.

For those of you who have listened to other episodes, if you haven't, highly recommend you go back to and listen to my solo episodes to give you more context. I had left my original dream job as a sports medicine physical therapist for young athletes, working primarily with swimmers to a niche concierge physical therapy practice where I worked not only with swimmers, although I worked with a lot of them. I worked with a lot of other elite athletes, professional athletes.

All kinds of people. And that particular concierge practice that I worked for right in 2015 was sort of an inflection point where I knew I had to get out of that job. Fortunately for me, here's the first gift that cancer brought. Cancer gave me the opportunity to leave, because I had to. It was sort of knocking on the door and going, hey, here's your opportunity to leave.

I'm a great excuse for you to get out of this dumpster fire that you're in. But let's back up a little bit. So 2014, I was in a dumpster fire of a professional situation, we'll call it. I had been so driven, swim, swim, swim, swim, just keep swimming all the way to the top. I had developed a bazillion and a half different chronic complex.

symptoms. I don't even want to call them illnesses. It was more like all these symptoms we were chasing that I couldn't quite get control over. And the first loud one that I could no longer quiet or manage or alleviate was panic attacks. Those came up in the summer of 2014, about a year before my diagnosis. And that was the first time I couldn't unhear, I couldn't unsee, I couldn't just keep swimming.

I mean, there were times growing up where I was injured, where I needed to take a step back out of the pool. My collegiate swimming career actually ended because of a shoulder injury. So I literally couldn't keep swimming, but I...

think that the panic attacks were the first time that I said, whoa, wait a minute. I'm not gonna just proverbially keep swimming. I'm gonna slow the fuck down and listen to what they are trying to tell me

They were so severe. I knew that I needed to take action in a way that was sinking a little deeper below the surface. And so I started, I went on antidepressants. know a lot of people have opinions about those. It was one of the best moves I could have possibly done. I also started doing therapy and it was sort of the beginning of

listening in. And over the course of a year, I did a lot of listening in and growing and healing and learning about myself and learning about that sink or swim mentality and how it served me in a lot of ways. And it's, it's a really important part of my fabric, but it also maybe wasn't serving me. Then about

six months after I had the panic attacks. So the panic attacks were in August of 2014. Just keeping you up with the timeline here. I developed another mystery illness. So my body had started to calm down around spring of 2015 and then I developed this burning in my chest and it took a couple of weeks to figure out it was my esophagus that was burning terribly.

and I had pain in my, ⁓ ribs. had this like burning into my shoulder, my right shoulder. just kind of a weird situation that I couldn't quite put my finger on knowing what I knew medically about the body, but also like I went to the doctor and they thought it was reflux. And so they gave me meds to take. And what was interesting was there was this little voice that was like, I don't

think the reflux meant they're gonna really touch this. But I also didn't know what else to do, so I decided to try and take them. They didn't bring any relief. In fact, I think they made me feel worse. And one day I was sitting in rush hour traffic driving to my dumpster fire of a job and I threw up all over myself in the front seat.

was like, well, can't go to work like this. So I drove directly to my primary care again and was like, well, this isn't going to work. What else you got? And I went to see a gastroenterologist after that, had an endoscopy. Turns out my esophagus was riddled with a yeast called Candida albicans. I don't know if I said that right. Now, Candida is like a real hot topic in the wellness world.

where people will diagnose themselves with it. They might get diagnosed by a naturopath or a functional medicine physician as you've got Candida, without actually testing for it. We all have Candida in our bodies. It's actually a normal part of the microbiome. It's part of your skin. It's everywhere. But there were literal sores up and down my esophagus, from my throat all the way to my stomach.

Well, that explained the pain and the mystery burning and all the things. And so the gastroenterologist, gave me medication. I took it, took like three weeks, didn't get any better. And that's when I started to look outside, maybe what we would call their traditional Western medical way of managing this. I started doing some Googling.

research, reading blogs. This has been the age of blogs before there were podcasts or really before there was like wellness, TikTok or influencers on Instagram. None of that existed. So it was blogs. And I read that actually the way that you get rid of Candida is what's called the Candida diet, eliminating basically all sugar and grains and good tasting food from your diet.

I saw a functional medicine physician about the same time and I loved it. It was a traditionally trained Western medicine physician, loved her. She was great. She was so thorough. She was like, wow, like look at all these mystery symptoms you've had your whole life. She unpacked literally my entire medical story, which was complex. And I was like, wow, this is the first time anyone's ever really sat down and listened to me. She gave me an hour of her time.

And it felt like someone was really putting the pieces together, not just to like solve the problem at hand, but figure out why it got there in the first place. And I loved that. This like curious, don't forget little Julie, that part of me inside, actually call her Leslie Knope, if you've seen Parks and Rec Like this, this like go for the gold, like super intense, means really well part of me. She was like, ⁓ man, this is amazing. Like we could learn more.

we could actually get to the root of this. We could actually solve the problem. It was great. They took like 27 vials of blood that day. And she heard about that mystery illness when I was a kid. And she actually traced it through my medical history. Well, it turns out all throughout my medical history as a child and into college and grad school, occasionally I'd have chest x-rays for

random things, chest illness, pneumonia or bronchitis, or at some point I had to have them to get into college and PT school as part of tuberculosis screening But from eighth grade on, we knew that there was this kind of large mass in my right upper lung.

Every time I'd have a x-ray, it would show up and it was still there. I had several CT scans along the way to look into it. And the CT scan showed that the size of the mass never changed. if they take...

scans in succession and there's no change after a certain period of time, then they send you out into the world and they tell you you're fine. Well, that's what I was told. but that day in the functional medicine office, I mentioned that as part of my medical history. by the way, I have these random things that show up in my lung and I've been told for years that it's fine. It's nothing. And I remember the physician looking at me and she was like, that's interesting.

Let's look into that. So she ordered another CT scan. Mind you, it had been nine years since my last one. And so I was convinced it was nothing. In fact, at some point, I'd seen a pulmonologist to follow up about the mysterious mass in my lung. And that pulmonologist had told me to tell every other physician I ever saw again not to worry about it and that it was nothing. And that's exactly what I did. But

Every time, even as a high schooler, that I went through getting an x-ray and then getting a CT scan and going through the whole rigmarole of seeing a specialist Even when they would assure me that it was nothing and back that with the data that showed that it hadn't grown and also back it with data right in front of us that I was a very young, active, healthy.

collegiate level elite swimmer. I showed, like my lab tests were normal. I showed no signs of it being cancerous. I had nothing to worry about. Even though there were all these assurances, this deep voice, very deep, would whisper, let's call her Hermione, after Hermione Granger in Harry Potter. Hermione would whisper, what if it's not nothing?

But in that sink or swim, we're just going to keep swimming. We're going to trust these doctors that we put on pedestals. I'm now a doctor. I identify with their expertise. I'm listening to the protocols they're following. I believe them. That part of me, the Dr. Christina Yang, would speak up and basically hush that Hermione voice inside of me.

So I listened to the functional medicine physician say, okay, we're gonna get a scan. And I was like, that feels optional. I don't know who to believe at this point because the lung expert told me that it's nothing. And then this person who's not really a lung expert is telling me she wants to look into it. And it's one of the first times in my time as a patient.

who was also a medical provider, who was someone who also idolized the medical world, was like, I don't really want to do anything about that.

Mainly because that deep voice, I was afraid that deep Hermione voice was right. And I didn't want to find out what the answer was.

So I decided to pursue the Candida pathway and the functional medicine pathway for managing Candida, which was indeed a Candida diet of eliminating literally everything from my diet, except for what I jokingly call cardboard and water. I rid my house of all things, including fruit containing sugar. I learned very quickly and failed many times on how to cook gluten.

dairy, grain-free things. I ate so many vegetables. my gosh, you guys. I experimented with so many vegetables and I learned that eggplant is disgusting. Also, why do we call it eggplant? Why can't we go with aubergine like they do in Britain? So much better. So much better of a name. Anyway, tangent. I was full sink or swim on the candida diet. I was like, all right.

Game on, we're gonna fricking master this. I'm gonna do it right, I'm gonna do it well, because the medication didn't work and we are gonna get rid of this. I also left that functional medicine appointment with like umpteen supplements, umpteen being a very precise number, obviously. And like a zillion and a half teas and lifestyle changes and meditations and all kinds of things that I was like, yeah, yeah, game on, let's do it.

So I turned my entire life and like wellness routine upside down in the name of getting healthy in about 72 hours. What could go wrong? Looking back, while this was, I believe, and I still support changing your diet for certain health issues, absolutely. I would say

there was a real read the room opportunity that didn't occur in that functional medicine visit to actually look at who are we handing over the keys to this restrictive, regimented diet and lifestyle. And so when I look back on it, can, for me, for Julie, in all honesty say it was a borderline, not outright eating disorder.

dressed up in the name of wellness. And I only know that because of how much pressure I felt, how five days into the diet, I was sobbing over the stove, trying to cook pancakes out of coconut flour that I was failing miserably at cooking, because I had no idea how to do that. And I was so hungry. I was hangry. And yet I was so devoted and so dedicated to what

these doctors said I had to do in order to get better and be healthy, that I didn't allow myself the mercy and the grace to break the diet until I was crying over the stove. And I remembered in the back of my mind that I had made these popsicles like a month earlier out of almond milk, banana and strawberry. And they're in like the bottom back of the fridge. I'd forgotten to throw them out when I threw everything out.

And had like five of them. And I could have never felt better when I just allowed myself some sugar. But I was terrified that by giving myself the sugar, I was going to make the candida worse and I was going to get sicker. So that's when you know it's a problem.

clear symptom. And what's really interesting is I ended up on that diet for like a while. Like we turned it into from a candida diet to an anti-cancer diet. Guess what? They're like the same thing. And again, while it was important to maybe modify my approach to how I was fueling myself and how I might've been inadvertently fueling cancer, even though I ate very healthy and clean already, but

I think that any diet we give any patient, even very, very well-meaning ones can become extreme in hands that aren't quite equipped to handle that diet in a healthy way, in a sustainable way, in a way that really honors who they are.

and it pulls people away from their intuition. It pulls people out of their bodies and into rule books. And that can only create a bigger divide and a bigger lack of agency and sovereignty in their own personal management of themselves. And honestly, I would say just like it did with my sport, with my profession, it became an identity. And that's when you also know it's a problem. So.

I was admiring people, I was following the rules, I was absolutely pledged allegiance to the scripture of science and medicine, even functional medicine, which seemed to have a lot of new evidence coming out, although a lot of it was anecdotal. Not necessarily randomized control trials on removing sugar in certain situations, right? A lot of my colleagues had moved into that world.

A lot of my friends had moved into that world. So of course it wasn't just my becoming my identity. wasn't like purpose only. It was also like my community around me started to be all of these people who had started to branch into that world. was becoming very cool in 2015 to kind of move out of the Western medicine world and swing the pendulum sort of all over to this whole like all natural. We're going to do it with diet and lifestyle, but we're not going to take medication thing. And I learned that firsthand with Candida.

So that was May of 2015, just to catch you up on the timeline. The esophageal stuff did actually start to improve. So here's the other thing that reinforced maybe the unhealthy obsession with otherwise healthy eating, which we might also call orthorexia. My symptoms improved. So I was getting some payoff for it. So again, it's not that it wasn't helping. It's that my approach to it

very well-meaning approach in the hands of someone who has that had at the time a very type-a perfectionist driven way of being at that time. That Dr. Christina Yang part inside of me was literally driving the bus. That athlete inside of me, that Leslie Knope inside of me were like gangbusters with all this kind of stuff. By June I decided to get that CT scan.

My functional medicine physician was very wise and she told me that I could not come back to see her until I had the CT scan. So I waited a month, I got it done begrudgingly and went back to see her so I could get my lab results from my blood tests. Well, first of all, the mass had more than doubled in size. had gone from four centimeters in diameter to 10, the size of a grapefruit over the course of nine years. Secondly, my blood tests were off the charts for inflammation.

Now we didn't know what the mass was. And she knew that I'd just gone through this candida stuff. So she was like, well, that could feasibly raise what's called your CRP, one marker of inflammation in your body.

And so I was like, well, game on. I'm just gonna keep up this diet. I'm gonna keep up everything because that seemed to eradicate the candida. Maybe it'll eradicate the inflammation. And she was like, you know, I really think you might wanna see like a thoracic surgeon about this thing in your lung. Like, let's just like do a consult. Again, she was kinda like threw the ball in my court. And I was like, sure, yeah, I'll look into that. And again, like dragged my feet. Several weeks later, I finally got around to it, end of June. I went to see this guy.

super skilled, super well recommended by several of my physicians that I saw. And the first thing he said when I walked in, I was 31, was, how old are you? You're like 50 years younger than my average patient. And I was like, no shit, Sherlock. I sat in the waiting room and with all due respect to these people, I feel like they could be my grandparents. And...

I felt like I didn't belong. these people are sitting there not the picture of health by any means. When you go to the thoracic surgeon, it's for lung cancer for the most part. Your typical person with lung cancer is someone who typically not always, definitely there are exceptions to this. There people who

don't lead super healthy lifestyles. So I definitely didn't feel like I belonged. He assured me he didn't think it was cancer because of how I looked again and decided to run a bunch of tests. There are all kinds of things that we did. All of them came back inconclusive. He suspected we needed to take the mass out because it was so large. It's humongous. There's a grapefruit up here under my collarbone in my chest.

But he was like, well, there's really no rush because you otherwise seem pretty good. Well, those were famous last words. By early July, I had a surgical biopsy with him and I never really bounced back from it.

Finally, things continued to spiral and I got sicker and sicker and I couldn't work anymore.

I didn't bounce back after a very routine outpatient, surgical biopsy. And I decided to go on disability leave. And that was the first time in my life I actually really gave myself permission to fully rest. But it took being so sick that I couldn't even stand up at work to do my job to do that.

I was running constant fevers. I was having night sweats. I couldn't sleep in the same bed as my husband because I was soaking the sheets through several times a It was terrible situation. It was hot. It was summer in Atlanta. We lived in this old house that didn't air conditioned super super well. I just remember being hot and sticky.

for weeks on end and miserable. And I would lay on the couch and watch Friday Night Lights, Texas Forever, and just pray for each day to pass. Meanwhile, the thoracic surgeon was meeting with experts from all over the place to figure out the approach because this tumor was so big. I was so young. He wanted to take advantage of me being really young so that he could be more aggressive, but didn't want to be so aggressive that it took me out.

functionally of my ability to use my arm or my neck or anything like that. So I was just waiting and waiting and waiting and getting sicker. Finally, I was so sick one day that I drove to the functional medicine office. I set up a sick appointment because my primary care didn't know what to do to help me. And so I went to this person who seemed like the only one really willing to listen.

And I was like, everyone's investigating this mass, but no one's really asking what it is. It seems like it's inconclusive on biopsy. It's not really showing up as anything. And she took a bunch of blood and she was like, I'm going to send this off to the Mayo Clinic. We're going to see if you have some weird really rare infectious diseases that can lead to random masses in your lung. So she did.

And kind of like also looked at me was like, I don't know what else to do for you. It's not that she didn't want to help. She was incredibly compassionate and supportive. But like, I just basically had fevers and anemia and there's nothing really she could do. I was already taking iron. I was taking stuff to help the fever. So the next day she called me because my blood work had come back showing I was so anemic that I needed a blood transfusion.

And what was interesting at that time, by that point, every morning when I woke up, I was so anemic that when I sat up and tried to stand up, I would black out. And so she was like, I want you to go to the emergency room. I'm going to call ahead and let them know what your blood values are and let them know I think they should admit you to the hospital so that you can get blood transfusions. Well, unfortunately, when I got to the emergency room,

They took my blood and my blood values were...

Low, very, very low, but Basically, you have to have seven or lower of hemoglobin in order to be admitted for a blood transfusion, and mine was 7.1. So the ER physician, seeing how sick I was, seeing how miserable I was, was very apologetic and was like, look, I believe you that your blood values were lower earlier today, but they're not right now. And I have to follow protocol and I can only go off of what we're seeing right here.

I was devastated because I was like, my God, this is my chance to finally feel a little bit better. And he said something that was really interesting, what's really interesting is it seems like Julie, in your case, nobody has connected the dots that maybe this mass is what's causing your really severe anemia.

And he said, I'm concerned about that because masses that cause severe anemia are often cancerous, but you've been told this isn't cancerous. So what I want you to see is the specialist who can probably help put those pieces together better than me. And I'm going to go call her. she agreed to see me the next morning. about 12 hours later. I went home that night. I fell asleep on the living room floor because I was afraid when I woke up, I would fall. So I was like, let me just start here.

And I was feeling encouraged to be able to see someone who could maybe put the pieces together for me. Well, that morning I did wake up and I got up to go to the bathroom

I really had to pee. So I ran into the bathroom, felt myself nearly blackout, but I didn't. Made it there, stood up, felt myself nearly blackout again. But I calculated I had maybe like 25 feet to get back to the couch. And so I tried, but I didn't make it. I blacked out, completely hit the deck, like hit my head all the way on the ground. And fortunately, Daniel was there. He saw it. He hadn't left for his normal morning run.

He called 911 and I ended up back at the same ER. And at that point, because I'd had a fall, that qualified me to get admitted to the hospital. That's what it took. And this is such an example of medical science, protocols, decision-making models that are generally very good for helping physicians to make really good sound evidence-based decisions.

This is an example of where they worked against me and it actually harmed me potentially. Thankfully I wasn't injured super badly from the fall, but it could have harmed me worse because of following the rules. And it's such an example where I remember leaving the ER that night and I was like, this is bullshit. Like that voice inside of me, that knew better, that was like, this is not nothing. These are definitely connected. I want to find out about this. I want to be admitted. I want a freaking blood transfusion. I know that's what I need.

That voice was getting really loud. And that Dr. Christina Yang voice was like, but no, we have to listen to doctors. You're a doctor, you get it? Like, you know, it was such a conflict inside of me going on. Well, finally, when I hit the ground at that point, I'm like, I mean, you're giving me a freaking blood transfusion. My blood better be the right level to earn this. Well, turns out by the time I get to the hospital,

and they do decide to admit me. My hemoglobin's not low enough. And it stayed that way for two days that I was in the hospital. So now we're at August 12th, 2015. They did a million more tests. We exhausted every test they could possibly do at this point on why I was fainting, why I was so anemic. Did I have internal bleeding? Was it a heart problem? Did I have a brain problem? Everything was normal. It was infuriating.

And finally, they were saying, well, there's really nothing we can do for you. Your blood levels aren't low enough for a blood transfusion. They were like, stick into the letter of the law on this one. And I get it. Blood transfusions are risky. If you're a medical provider, I absolutely get why people made this decision. So no shame on them. I get it. But.

I knew that voice inside of me knew that's what I needed. And I was angry, especially as a physical therapist who knows about falls and fall risk and wouldn't dare go into a hospital room and tell a patient to get out of bed when they were that anemic, like that would be malpractice. I knew that them telling me I could get out of bed and go home was incorrect.

I was so angry and I remember just being so angry about it and telling Daniel and he decided to leave. It was about 6 p.m. and he was gonna leave and go get me Chick-fil-A, sort of my comfort food. At that point, I also decided who cares about the diet. I was so mad, I felt so sick. And he went and got me chicken tenders and I think chicken soup or something. And it was glorious. As we are sitting in my room, it's about 7.30 at this point, eating Chick-fil-A, there's a knock on the door.

And in walks a woman with dark curly hair and a white coat, a physician. She pulls up the hospital recliner next to my bed. I put my chick flay aside. she introduces herself as, I'm the person you were supposed to see. That specialist, the ER doctor, sent you to. And you never came to see me. So it turned out I fainted ended up back in the hospital the morning I was supposed to see her. I stood her up. And she said,

You've really been through it and I've read your chart and I'm so sorry that it seems like nobody knows how to help you. But I know how to help you.

Those two sentences, I'm so sorry, it seems like nobody knows how to help you, but I know how to help you. I'm tearing up just picturing it. That's all she had to say. She could have said anything after that. She could have told me we were going to the moon and I would have been like, how do I sign up? Where's my space suit? It was all I needed for someone to say, I see you, I get it. Here's what we're doing. Here's what needs to happen.

It was like one of the most validating moments. And it was so validating to my inner voice that was like, this is something. There's something here and I need help and I need someone to see me and hear me. Well, here's one of my favorite parts of the story. She knew that I didn't show up for the appointment.

But she was on the hospital floor, hearing a colleague talk about my case. And she put it together that I was the patient the ER doctor had called her about three nights before. And she sidled up to her colleague, listened in, looked at my chart, even though I wasn't her patient, which you're not really supposed to do.

and said, you've got it wrong. She doesn't have nothing. What she has is cancer.

That thing in her lung that everyone has told her is nothing. The reason she has anemia is because that thing in her lung is cancer. The biopsy says it was inconclusive and or benign. It's not benign, it's cancer.

And she's explaining all of this to me that she then sort of stole me and was like, I'm going to go see her. So she's staying after her work day to come see me in the hospital, knowing they're thinking of sending me home the next morning. She comes in at 730 at night. It's not usually when physicians are rounding and seeing patients.

And she's explaining all this to me and she explains from start to finish why this is cancer and why nobody knew it was cancer. It's called an inflammatory myofibroblastic tumor. it's a very rare form of sarcoma. Sarcoma is a soft tissue, connective tissue cancer. It occurs very often in the lung. It arises from the connective tissue around the lung called the pleura.

It's not a lung cancer. It comes with very, very slow growing speed. It usually occurs in childhood. Remember that mystery illness I had in kindergarten? We traced it all the way back to there. The symptoms can come and go. They can appear to be other things like asthma or allergies And it's called inflammatory and so it raises your inflammatory markers.

And when you have inflammatory markers, it brings on candida in some people. It's only diagnosed in 100 people in the United States every year. It's that rare. And that's why when I had a biopsy, even the pathologist who read the biopsy didn't quite recognize the cell type.

enough to flag and say, ⁓ this is something.

they kind of were in the neighborhood of describing it they didn't go so far as to say, this is a cancer.

We need to treat it like it's a cancer, not this just random thing that we're going to take out of our lung with surgery.

And then she tells me something really interesting.

She says, it's not a lung cancer, it's a connective tissue cancer. And that's why all these years you've been told it's not cancer, it's nothing, because they're looking for lung cancer symptoms. Now by this point, I had developed a cough because the mass, the tumor was pressing on my collarbone and my ribs and my windpipe. But typically it doesn't create respiratory symptoms.

except for the fact that I was diagnosed with asthma in high school.

And that was managed pretty well with inhalers. So she was like, it's not a lung cancer, but here's what's really interesting. By mistake, this particular tumor in one case study was diagnosed as a lung cancer. And it went through a clinical trial where a new type of lung cancer drug was being tested. That particular lung cancer drug is what's called a genetically targeted chemotherapy, where it targets only cells that have

a gene mutation that caused the tumor to grow. And she said, so what they learned by mistake was that that 50 % of people with inflammatory myofibroblastic tumors or IMTs like yours might qualify for this drug. So 50 % of the tumors had the gene mutation that made the tumor grow. And that drug targets

cells that have that gene mutation. She said, so what we need to do is take your tumor sample and send it off to a special lab that's going to do some genetic testing. The ultimate way to cure this type of cancer is surgery. So you're already on the right track with that. But in an ideal world, you have a 50 % chance, if you qualify, then what we could do is potentially try that chemotherapy and see if it will shrink the tumor.

So you're no longer going to be trying to take a 10 centimeter tumor out of your lung, which will cause a lot of collateral damage. We could get it as small as possible and give you a much better chance at super great long-term outcomes, especially because you're so young. So that was the plan. I would go forward with surgery. And if we got the genetic test back before the surgery and they showed that I qualified for the drug, then we would start the drug.

the test didn't come back, I would still go forward with surgery. When she left my room that night, I remember...

Almost throwing a party. Celebrating.

And that might feel really counterintuitive. But if you've ever gone through chronic illness that everyone tells you they don't know what it is, and you finally get that diagnosis, it's one of the most validating and celebratory moments of the whole process. You finally feel seen. Those voices inside of me, that Hermione voice that said for decades at this point, what if this isn't nothing? What if these experts are wrong?

What if these people you idolize and put on pedestals just like you, doctors like you, what if they're wrong?

That voice that my inner Dr. Yang had squashed for years so that I could just keep swimming. That voice was right.

I was not only awash with celebration relief and validation, but we had a plan.

And the first part of that plan was to give me the blood transfusion that I also knew I needed. I actually had two of them before I left the hospital. And that was so I could safely go home and build up strength for surgery.

I also went to the oncology office for a couple of weeks after that, getting ready for surgery, I had iron infusions. In her words, it was like very sports medicine approach, even though it was oncology, was like, we got to juice you up for the main event. We got to get you ready. And I so appreciated that because it spoke to me as the athlete mentality, as that sink or swim mentality, like we're going to swim. The problem was even in those two weeks, I was so sick. I'd lost so much weight.

I'd actually fractured ribs from the dry cough that I had. And because the tumor had grown into my ribs, I was in pain. And the athlete in me knew this is no way for me to show up for the main event. wasn't ready. And that inner voice spoke up loud. In fact, it was in that time that I realized there was another part of me. wasn't just Hermione, like my intuitive voice, which is what I label intuition with. I call that voice Cassandra.

out of Greek mythology, like the warning voice that no one's listening to. Cassandra was like, you shouldn't have surgery. You can't have surgery. This is wrong. And in those two weeks from leaving the hospital to when my surgery was scheduled, I was awash with dread because I heard that Cassandra voice inside of me. I believed her. And yet,

all the people, even this new expert, this oncologist, were like, this is right, you need to have surgery, this is what you need to do, this is what our plan is.

So I was diagnosed on August 12th, 2015. This episode is being released on August 13th, 2025.

10 years in one day to the day of diagnosis. Two weeks later, August 26th, 2015, I was scheduled for surgery.

On August 25th, I woke up Barely able to put one foot in front of other. was feeling so heavy with dread. It was time for me to go to the hospital for my pre-op appointment, run tests, make sure everything was good.

I knew that all my blood tests would be back to normal, generally speaking, I was still running fevers, I knew that on an emotional level, I wasn't ready. knew physically I could withstand the surgery, technically speaking, but I didn't want to.

And as I was walking out of the house, I grabbed the keys to go to the hospital. My phone rang. It was someone from the hospital calling, which was not a new thing at that point in my life. It was annoying I was like, you're kidding me. They're calling to confirm my appointment when I'm on the way here. Did they think I wasn't going to come? And so I ignored it. I didn't want to hear from people at the hospital. I was dreading it so much.

Well, that number called right back. So at this point, I'm like, wow, persistent. All right, fine. I'll answer the phone and humor this person who's just following protocol. Well, it turned out it wasn't just like an assistant following protocol to confirm my appointment. It was the oncologist. And she sounded incredibly cheerful. And I just remember the emotional contrast I felt. Like she was cheerful and I felt so much dread and anger.

that I was going through this because I felt like I had to and didn't have a choice. And yet it felt wrong. And she said, well, good news, your genetic tests actually came back just this morning. And the best news of all is you are in that 50 % of tumor types that qualify for the drug. And what that means is we're going to postpone your surgery and we're going to try and shrink the tumor. Literally the 11th hour, she called.

and surgery was off. And what did I feel? Validated, yet again. Because my inner voice, that inner Cassandra and the inner intuition, Hermione, they were right.

They were right. I wasn't supposed to have surgery. And those test results didn't have to come back before surgery. That was the plan. I was going to have it whether we had the test results or not. Months later, after I had the actual surgery, which was about nine months later, and after the tumor did shrink with the genetically targeted chemotherapy, the surgeon said, well, I'm really glad you didn't have the surgery when this tumor was 10 centimeters because I'm not sure you would have survived.

That was the existential dread I was feeling. I knew that deep voice, that Cassandra voice, she knew this was wrong. And if you don't believe in divine intervention of any type, let this be your tale. It could have just been a coincidence in timing, but there was absolutely a hand at work there, a greater hand. At least that's what I believe. I believe that was also true.

on August 12th, 2015, when at the 11th hour, the physician came in with the answer. She treated me like a human. She told me, see you. I know what the answer is. And she again was sort of the portal of that divine intervention on August 25th, almost two weeks later, stopping the inevitably harmful thing that was gonna happen to me.

So that's the descent and the very topsy turvy time of diagnosis. Now there was lots that happened after that. gave you a tiny sneak peek, but that's not the purpose of this episode to talk about actually going through treatment. Spoiler alert, I made it. And the cancer has not recurred one time since then. So 10 years later.

On June, I don't know the exact date. It was mid-June of this year, 2025. I had my 10-year scan in Atlanta. I drove down there, I got an Airbnb. I've made it like kind of a fun trip for myself because it's inherently not a fun experience where I don't feel like I belong. I had a wonderful coffee date with new friend, Megan, rode my mountain bike.

Went for a swim at the pool where I grew up.

just kind of re-walked a lot of the journey. And it gave me a really wonderful opportunity to reflect on that personality of mine, that swimmer that was born from a really young age, that sink or swim mentality. It gave me the opportunity to re-walk a lot of the scenes from the cancer diagnosis part of my life. Drove by my old house, drove through the old neighborhood, drove through

places I used to work, drove by them, even the dumpster fire job. And it gave me the opportunity to really reflect on, of course, how far I've come, but how I've really shifted from sink or swim to sink and swim. The sink and swim actual moment came later. It was right before surgery happened, where I really made that shift.

But the short version is that I learned that it's not sink or swim. It's not sink and then swim. And these are like enemies of each other. Sink is actually the best friend of swim. It's both. That when we sink, we find these moments that feel like dread, that feel like powerlessness, where we recognize that the voices behind those feelings, the Hermione voice, the Cassandra voice,

they're here to tell us something really important. It's in those sinking moments where the body has these symptoms that we're trying to quiet or manage or alleviate or leave or get rid of that are giving us information on how to actually swim into who we really are, into what we're really meant to do, into who our people really are.

And when I really sank in and saw in those moments while those voices were 100 % correct, it not only affirmed for me that my inner voices are the best and most skilled and expert doctor out there. No other person on a pedestal knows more than I do.

And they were right. They knew just as much as that expert oncologist. It's not that she doesn't know a lot. And it's not that I didn't need her. It's not that I didn't need that functional medicine physician to go, wait, I think there's something in your lung we want to look at.

It's that they were external voices that were confirming what my internal voices were already saying and had said for decades.

And voices and they're always right. I didn't put that together right then. It's only in living out the tale over 10 years that that became so solid for me.

Those voices became louder. They became more self-assured. They showed up through other health issues. They showed up through other things that I was running around trying to manage through functional medicine or balancing hormones or balancing my cortisol or basically seeing when I looked back that Candida was a symptom of a deeper thing. Energetically speaking, somatically speaking, cancer was a symptom.

of a deeper thing. That's out of the scope of this whole episode, but I believe that it has a biological and chemical basis, probably a genetic basis. We don't know exactly how I ended up with cancer in my lung as a small child. But what I also know and have done a lot of research around, but also very more importantly, intuitively know,

that.

There's A certain series of emotional, energetic, psychological wounds, processes, experiences that maybe didn't cause the problem but didn't help the problem.

And as I said, there's way more to that than we can unpack in this episode.

So all that to say, when I look back on it, I see that my voices were always right. I see there's this deep voice in there that when I was having panic attacks would say something is happening and nobody is coming. That voice was correct because something was happening in my lung ever since I was a small child and nobody was coming for it. In fact,

I was told for decades it was nothing. But that voice of panic, which was labeled as an anxiety disorder, was actually correct. So when we sink into and actually listen to what those parts of us are saying, they're right.

And when I look at that over the course of my life, of my health, of my clients that I've worked with, both as healthcare patients and also now as coaching clients, generally speaking, all of our inner parts, while they may show up with irrational things to say or very burdened experiences and heightened emotional experiences and somatic experiences or really

mystery illnesses, they're right. The stories they're telling are right. If you get behind the surface of what the stories are saying and listen to the essence of the story. And so that's how I came up with the idea of the soul story, of sinking in and listening to the soul of the story being told. When you look at my cancer story, it illustrates that perfectly.

The words that the parts were using, Hermione and Cassandra, even Dr. Yang, the words weren't 100 % correct, but the essence of the story behind them was correct. And I've seen this over and over again with people. And I just wanna be really clear that I'm not saying every disease is psychosomatic. I'm not saying that there aren't like biochemical causes to our diseases. I'm not saying that.

Sugar doesn't cause cancer, all those kind of things. It's so multifactorial and nuanced. But if we ignore these parts, then we miss a huge part of the story. And if we go at it with a sink or swim mentality of just heal it, fix it, relieve it, quiet it, we miss the story. If I go gangbusters on it with my inner Dr. Yang running the story not only for my own health, but other people's health.

I'm going to miss the stories that their souls are trying to tell me.

I'm certainly gonna miss my own. And that has been a relationship that I have developed with all of my inner parts to really hear what they're trying to tell me. And when it is time to seek Western or functional or Eastern or alternative medicine options, and when it's not, when it's actually not necessarily a health issue,

but an issue that might be more spiritual or emotional in root. Usually it's all three, but sometimes I can parse it out a little bit. But I've had to almost reorient, I've done a lot of therapy around this to reorient my relationship to these voices. I see the value in anger now. How angry I was when I thought I was supposed to have surgery and all these people were telling me to do something that my deepest voices knew was wrong.

That was the voice of Cassandra. She was so angry.

But that anger was important. It was trying to protect me. It was trying to get my attention.

How angry I felt before my diagnosis when people were telling me this is nothing. You can't have a blood transfusion. And I'm like, you can't send me home without it. That would do me harm. But they were gonna do it anyway. That was such an important clue. And we as women are taught that anger is wrong. That it's bad. That makes us mean or bitchy or whatever.

Such an important clue.

I also redeveloped a relationship with health information. That part of me, that inner Leslie Knope, who's so curious and just wants to be the best and learn all the information.

She's still present. She still gets to learn, but it's no longer in service to avoiding or fixing what she views as a problem or what my inner Dr. Yang views as a problem, either in myself or in my clients. Now I moved out of healthcare and a big reason I moved out of healthcare was because it is based on a problem-based model where we see pathology, we diagnose, we fix it, we intervene.

and it keeps patients in this identity and in this purpose of being sick.

And I'm not just talking about a reactive based model where we only react to problems. There's also preventative medicine or even functional medicine and wellness that Pathologizes things that aren't necessarily problems to be fixed, but there might be information about a deeper issue or something that actually doesn't need to be chased, but just needs to be accepted

One thing that I've done over 10 years is I've reoriented my relationship to what being healthy and being well actually looks like and being fully alive I no longer consume health information obsessively.

I no longer have a lifestyle or a diet that I feel like if I break one rule that it's all going to follow.

I make decisions from an intuitive place, from that Hermione voice, from my inner Dr. Yang who is now wise and a resource that I tap into when I need to. I don't take a million courses, mainly because I'm not practicing in healthcare anymore and I don't have to, but also because I understand that too much information can absolutely cloud your intuition. We're quite complex and we're also not complex.

Most people have the answer within them on what it is they need or what's going on. And when we position ourselves as these experts of them, of their experience, it sets up a power differential, it sets up pedestaling where we either want to be on the pedestal because it makes us feel powerful. And I hate to say that as health care providers, but it is so true. If you find purpose in healing, helping, fixing, saving,

someone else, it can develop that, you contribute to it. But then even if you don't hold that role or that identity for yourself and you kind of want to be equal playing and collaborators with your patients, they might still pedestal you.

And that's a huge way that our healthcare system is broken. That we don't allow the sovereignty and agency and autonomy of people's intuitive knowing to have a seat at the table.

Now, I only choose my medical team, regardless of whether they're in that sort of Western Eastern alternative label for themselves, if they allow my intuitive voices to have a seat at the table. If they respect that I have a medical background and I actually speak the language There's nothing I hate more.

then when I actually walk in informed and I'm looking to have a collaborative conversation with a physician or an NP or a PA or whoever it is to help me make an informed decision. And I walk in having done a huge literature review and I'm very clear what the evidence says. And they tell me that I'm wrong. And I'm like, I printed it out. It's in front of me. What do want me to do? And it's not because I'm wrong. I know I'm right.

It's that, you know, they're doing their best. They may not know. And so they're operating within whatever silo or paradigm or protocol or whatever it is that they were trained to do, just like we can't give you blood because that's the protocol. Even though this person in front of me is telling me they need it and is showing every symptom that says they need it and is falling on their face.

So I only choose providers now based on how sovereign I feel, not their credentials, not how much I look up to them. In fact, I choose to look at them as an equal.

What I also have done is I have muted or unfollowed 80 % of wellness and medical providers on Instagram. I don't need a constant flow of medical information for me to feel safe in my body. I need to feel safe in my body. And knowing what my background has been in

how I approach health, both as a provider supporting others, but also as a person supporting themself and as a patient engaging with the medical community is more information is not more. It's just more chaos and it can create without you even meaning to that regimented rule system. Case in point, perimenopause. Perimenopause is absolutely having its moment. And I love that for us.

especially those of us who are right in it, in our 40s. The problem is, even that is developing this sort of rule book and all these protocols that are rigid that you need to follow. I fell into that. I had the protein down and the strength training and the fiber and blah, blah, blah. But what I missed in all of my intuitive discernment was

I needed hormone replacement at 41 because so many of my very well-meaning providers that I had handpicked told me I was too young. And so I gaslit myself into thinking my cortisol was too high or I had a gut microbiome problem. All, again, well-meaning interpretations by the functional medicine world, but it totally missed the symptoms of the person in front of them.

the voices, the things I was saying to them. I gaslit myself too, with my own wellness knowledge. And the other thing that was missed was I'm an athlete. When you add that layer into perimenopause, you can get what's called RED-S Guess how many studies I've published on RED-S That's my research area, Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, AKA the former version of the female athlete triad.

You can set yourself up for subclinical reds if you're an athlete in perimenopause, because your hormones are already declining. Your metabolic needs are different. You're very active trying to keep your weight under control and your muscles under control and your brain healthy and all this stuff. And you can put yourself into an energy deficit and not fuel correctly. So all this cut out sugar.

high protein, high fiber, et cetera, I inadvertently was cutting out too many carbs. Not that I cut them all out, but it was really, it was like a watered down version of the cancer and anti-Candida moment until I caught it and was like, I heard my body and it was like, eat some fricking carbs. And I recognized how far I'd come from that like restrictive eating pattern that I got myself into a decade before.

But even then, there are just a couple little things to work through emotionally that were fear of doing that because of how much carb shaming, how much sugar shaming there is in the wellness industry. So that is why I mute those voices, because it moves me away from what actually applies to me and what I actually need. I've put myself on a need to know basis instead of a nice to know basis with all of that kind of stuff, which also feels like as a medical provider, I'm not

looking at or listening to my colleagues and my friends.

But when everyone out there is preaching those things from a really great place, it's not my place to consume it. And I can still support them in other ways that doesn't look like liking all of their posts. So if you're one of my friends and I haven't liked your posts recently, it's not personal. I'm doing it to take care of me. You keep doing your stuff. Super proud of you.

The other thing that I just want to call out is in the wellness industry specifically, it's like a multi-billion dollar industry. Now, and I'm reading a book, I don't have it near me, but it's called How to Be Well. It's an investigative journalist who has really started to unpack some of the myths, some of the good parts and some of the extreme non-

helpful

practices and advice that has come through the wellness industry. It's an unregulated industry, just like the beauty industry, just like the diet industry. And what she really equates it to is an evolution and a combination of the beauty and diet industry. Now it's just dressed up as clean and green and biohacking and it's dressed up as health and wellness. And it's really nothing more than what we might call purity culture or eating disorders or

orthorexia, or what I call health dysmorphia, where we see ourselves as unhealthy when we actually are quite healthy. We're constantly trying to solve problems that aren't actually problems. And then all we're constantly doing is fixing ourselves. We're projects to fix. We're not actually living. We're not actually well. It's completely paradoxical. It's what I went through from such a good place.

with both the candida diet and the anti-cancer diet. Guess what? Now I eat everything. It's fine, And it took a lot to get me here to be able to be intuitive about that. But I recognize just how it was purity culture. Women need to be pure and perfect and small and skinny and nice, not too much and not too emotional. Cause if your cortisol is out of imbalance, you might be too emotional. Like,

taking all of these things geared towards women and telling us to be less of them. And now we've added on health and wellness packaging to make it feel even more righteous and correct.

Now I've decided I'm unsubscribing. I'm gonna jump in there when I need information that's actually helpful from people who actually are willing to listen to all of me and honor all of me.

But my inner doctor is now a calm, discerning Dr. Yang who works together with my intuition, my inner Hermione, who listens to the warnings from my inner Cassandra, who also still has big goals and wants to achieve with my inner Leslie Knope But now we're trying to achieve what feeling full joy and full aliveness actually looks like and feels like, even if that means we don't have as many rules and structure.

to help us feel safe.

I'm no longer fixing. I'm not optimizing. I am perfect as I am. There's no more perfectionism in health. Perfectionism was never healthy in the first place.

I sink I listen, and that's what allows me to swim into full aliveness. So that's what allowed me to really step into what I offer now. Sinking in and listening to people's souls, those parts that they might've been told to quiet or manage or relieve or fix, especially when it comes to emotional signals and thoughts that were told just shift your thoughts or your mindset.

whatever your beliefs, they're bringing really important information. It's a really important part of us. And in those messages is your soul story. Those messages tell you who you are.

Most importantly, that who you are is not all the things you do. It's not the diseases you have. It's not the people you help. It's not all the roles you play. You're so much more than that. What makes you fully human and fully alive and a beautiful luminaire soul is none of those things. But your soul also has a story that tells your purpose. What you, your beautiful soul, is designed to do in this lifetime.

And most people come to me, that's usually people's entry point, is, this intuitive tug, these voices of their own, they have different parts, different names, all those things, that are saying, this is not it. This thing I built is not it. And sometimes those voices are showing up through body dysfunction, through chronic illness, through all these weird symptoms, and they're managing all of it. Their hormones are all out of whack. Most of the people are recognizing this right around midlife.

when we're all starting to have no more fucks to give and we're asking all these like deeper questions, existentially about who we are and what we're supposed to be doing. But that's typically the entry point is what am I supposed to be doing? Sometimes it's, okay, I built this business, but I don't want it like this anymore. Or I want to get back to work because I've been a stay at home mom for a while. Or actually I want to be a stay at home mom. Or I want to leave my job and build a business or...

I want to do a complete 180 on my career and leave an entire profession or I want to retire early. Lots of things come up and it's a beautiful process to help people sink in and go through the process of sinking because there's a lot of identities you have to remove. I call it the conformity corset. All the things we think we are all the identities we think we are all of the roles we play.

You can't just rip it off and figure out who you are in like one fell swoop. It's a very slow process. And so that's the work I do with people. It's co-creative, it's collaborative. We get really curious about those inner parts and the stories they're telling. We get really curious about the signals from the body. And that's the part I love about being a healthcare provider is I can really help them differentiate between this is like a health issue where I need to seek help from a medical professional or

Ooh, this is more of a somatic cue coming from my inner parts, from my spirit, from my soul that's asking me to listen to it. It's such a beautiful part of inner parts work and somatic work that I help people do. And I trust that people in front of me, just like me, they have the answers. I'm not here to give answers or advice or direction, especially not any that goes against their inner knowing, for sure.

I love helping to hold space for people to return to their own knowing and to help unburden all of those inner parts that are operating in a way exaggerated way, like all of mine were as well. I help people see that their sensations, the things you feel and experience in your head and your body, they are messengers, not problems to be fixed. Everything is there for a reason and it brings value, no matter how annoying it is.

So there's alchemy in that. And we aren't just putting lipstick on a pig and saying, let's look on the bright side and see what this is here to teach us. No, we actually go into the muck of the annoyance, of the pain, of the tension, of the anger, of the grief, of whatever it is. And cozy up with it.

And usually when we sink all the way down there, that's where those inner messages come clear.

I help people shift from fixing problems to shifting towards being fully alive, really following what it is they want. Most of the women I work with come to me really clear that I don't want this. They have no clue what they actually want and that's terrifying to them. It's terrifying in the same way I had moments in my 10 year journey from cancer where I was like, well, I don't want to feel like I'm constantly chasing problems. I don't want to feel like I'm constantly a project to fix.

I want to feel relaxed. I want to feel intuitive, but I don't actually know what that looks like.

And the only way for me to really get there was to sink into the parts of me that wanted to micromanage and hyper fixate and diagnose and all the things and really listen to what was going on behind their operating system.

I know those parts, those voices of my soul story. They always knew. Even before we called it cancer, they always knew. It's not what all of the experts told me it was.

Those parts always knew that sinking fully into that illness was an initiation.

I think that's why they were so willing to let go and really tell me what was happening.

But ultimately it went from pledging allegiance to science and medicine as gospel to seeing symptoms and these inner parts as their own version of a sermon to listen to.

That medicine, the best medicine, is often not what you read in a research study. It's often not what a wellness influencer tells you to swallow or do with your colon or chant six times a day.

It's all inside of you. And sometimes you need someone to help you translate what all those things are saying to you. And that's what I am here for. The sink is where the magic happens. That's where the instructions to fully live, i.e. fully swim, exist.

For me, cancer 10 years ago was not a diagnosis. It was an invitation to redirect to full aliveness. So 10 years cancer-free, technically, at my 10-year appointment with my oncologist, I have to tell you, he was actually quite hesitant to say those words.

because he's trained to look for problems and fix them. And that's another reason I always get annoyed going down there. Because you take a scan of someone's body on any given day, something's going to show up, something weird. I've had blood vessels that are not in the right place. I've had random masses show up in my other lung. I've had ovarian cysts. I have a fibroid. All kinds of things show up. And an oncologist's job,

is to investigate. Basically, it's guilty until proven innocent. That's their job. I get it. Anything could be cancer these days. And sure enough, other stuff shows up on my scan every time. And he's like, oh, I don't know. I probably need to follow that and keep an eye on it.

Sometimes I decide we're going to follow it when it seems like it's a good idea. And sometimes I'm like, you know what? I'm comfortable living my whole life without having to run down a rabbit hole of doing a million tests that will ultimately turn out nonconclusive and keep me in this spin of being sick or being a project to fix.

When I went to my 10-year appointment, I had to point out to him it was 10 years, first of all, because he was so focused on all the things in my scan that could be something but are probably nothing. And finally, I said, hey, can we just agree that the original tumor hasn't recurred in 10 years? Can you say that out loud to me? And he did. And I said, can we agree that I don't need to have scans for that tumor anymore?

Can you say that out loud to me? And he did.

And the whole point of me making him say that was almost a ritual because to me, my inner voices were saying, This has been complete since you had the tumor removed nine years ago.

It never recurred. You are complete.

My inner voices have said that.

And I love that my orientation to my body and to medicine has changed. Where those people on a pedestal are no longer the ones giving me the information, my internal doctors are. And because we're humans in community, we can't always know the full truth until it's reflected back to us by someone else. And so what I was simply looking for was affirmation.

And I got it. And so now I'm fully alive. And I'm so grateful for that. In fact, I'm throwing a party in celebration of my 10 years in a couple of weeks. And I can't wait. It's going to be all about life. It's not going to be about cancer. The whole theme of it is about living fully. So if you also have made it through something,

that was real touch and go, and maybe it wasn't cancer, maybe it was an emotional thing, maybe it was a divorce, maybe it was death of someone or something important to you. I recommend, one, getting support, if you haven't already thought of that. And number two,

You have the dark parts that are hidden below the surface.

You can be afraid of those. And there's also an opportunity to do it with support or do it with courage. Courage is not the absence of fear. It's deciding to sink in even when it feels scary. And I recommend you do that in a titrated, kind way to your system, which is why having support for it is really important.

So we're celebrating being fully alive. We're celebrating being 10 years. We're celebrating being at the 10 year diagnosis-versary. Cancer is not my identity. It's not my purpose, but it's such an important part of my sink and swim story. So thank you for listening. I'm to be talking a little bit more about this in my next solo episode, specifically around how this has shaped.

my relationships in the healthcare world and my relationship to my identity as healthcare provider. So thank you for listening. I welcome you to share this with anyone if it resonates with you, leave a review on any of the platforms and make sure to tune into our next episode. Bye.