Ep 01 - Healing Not Hiding: My Story

In this premiere episode, host Natiki Hope Pressley opens up about her journey through illness, uncertainty, and faith. With raw honesty and grace, she shares the moment everything changed, what it means to stop hiding your pain, and how healing begins when you allow yourself to be fully seen.

This episode sets the tone for the Health, Healing, and Hope podcast — a space for real stories, quiet strength, and the hope that carries us through life’s most challenging moments.

If you’ve ever battled in silence, this is your invitation to begin again — with grace, with truth, and with hope.

Transcript

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Welcome, welcome. Hello. And thank you so much for joining us this evening, and I say us because, although it's me here today, this evening, it will be others and certainly there are. A few people behind this project. Family members and friends who've supported me along my journey, so I wanna include them as well as I want to. Thank God for being present here with me now. So thank you for joining us, all of us, and for being here and spending your time with me. I know there's so many other places you could be. Tonight, but you chose to be here and I sincerely appreciate that. I will respect your time. I'll do my best. This is my first episode, so I really want some grace here, but I will do my best to be thoughtful about your time I want you to get everything that you need this evening from me, and I will be sure to provide that with you efficiently and. As expeditiously as possible. No promises there. My name is Niki Hope Presley, and I am 55 years young, not yet. November I'll be 55, I will probably do that a little bit because I don't always know how old I am. I tend to either say I'm younger or older and somehow never land right there on the number. Simply because the years just seem to be going by and I can't seem to keep track of things. Is that a sign of getting old? I don't know. I don't know. You tell me. You comment and let me know. But I will say I'm grateful to God that I am 54 and will be 55 in November on the 19th, but in the meantime, I'm here to just share. Everything I've received in those 54 years, this will be our journey together. The title of this episode today is Healing Not Hiding. Healing, not Hiding. So let me start with my journey up. A few years ago, I had gone to the doctor. I was feeling something was going on with me. I just. I wasn't feeling well. I wasn't like a sick to my stomach or headache, it was just my body. Something just wasn't right and I can't fully explain that. But hopefully as we get to know each other, you'll learn a little bit more about me. And so that happens to me sometimes. It's just God and you just gotta go with it. So I was feeling a little bit odd. Something was off. And. I said to my husband, listen, I'm gonna have to go to the doctor and check things out. Something's not right, not feeling good on the inside. And my body's just not processing things the way it normally does. My husband says, okay, I'm gonna you help you out. You need me to help you make an appointment. I know sometimes doctors take a long time to get appointments, so sometimes you're waiting for months and months. To get an appointment. So it's very important side note that if there's something going on with you immediately get, try to schedule an appointment because sometimes you're not gonna get it right away. Time is everything. And so the quicker you discover something, the better your chances are of recovery. So I get an appointment with the doctor, I go see the doctor, and the expectation is, tell me something simple start doing this or stop eating that. Or just do this and do that. Or here, take this and for five days and you should feel better. And we like that. We like a quick fix. We like something that seems like, oh, it wasn't a big deal. I just needed to just, rest. Or I needed to take more vitamins, or I needed to do a supplement, or I need to eat more of this, and less of that. In this case, that wasn't what happened, and I knew something wasn't right and I couldn't pinpoint it. So I get a call and the doctor says, Hey, I wanna see you. Can you come on in? And I was scheduled to meet and I knew at this point we were gonna discuss the findings. And so my doctor says, you have cancer? Yeah. And at that moment. Honestly, I totally disconnected. There are times when you hear something. I know you may have experienced this before, where your mind disconnects, you just disappear and your heart says I don't have time or space. I don't have room for that. I don't have room for the challenge or this difficulty, pain hurt. I don't have room for that right now. And that's exactly what happened. Time stood still, and I started to stare out of the window almost like I was looking to just escape the moment, but I turned my head and shifted to my husband just to look in his eyes because I knew that he was struggling. In some ways I wanted to provide assurance, like it's gonna be okay, but I didn't have the words at that moment. I didn't have the words to say anything to him. I couldn't ease his pain I was still processing my own, I was still processing. What was happening Not long after, my doctor says, Hey, so this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna do this, we're gonna do that. And honestly, I didn't hear any of it at that time. I didn't hear it. I later of course, reviewed that information with my doctor, but when they were sharing that, when it was being shared I honestly just couldn't hear it. It was like wmp, like Charlie Brown. And, when they're sitting in the classroom and the teacher's talking and it's just Wamp W that's exactly what it sounded like. And I finally had to just pull myself together and focus, move away from the feeling, the emotion of it, and then just stand in it to get everything I needed to know at that moment. What do I need to know? So the doctor says, Hey, you need to start chemo. We're gonna do, this is the treatment schedule, then we're gonna do this, we're gonna do radiation, and then we're gonna see what's happening. And if need be, we will do surgery. So it was chemo, radiation, and surgery. And that is definitely the order of normal order of things for most people with a diagnosis. Western medicine is very textbook. So that's what we did. We did chemo and once we were done with chemo, we did radiation and we celebrated. I rang the bell and. Got to see the doctor and doctor says, Hey, listen, it seems like things are a little bit better than when we got started, but it's not quite where we wanted it. It's certainly not what we expected. And of course, I looked at them and said, I don't know what you were expecting. I was expecting this thing to be completely gone at this point. But it wasn't. And so the next thing we had to do was schedule surgery. So we scheduled the surgery with my amazing doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. And we scheduled the surgery round about February of 2023. And I know that because it was around Valentine's Day. And my husband, as precious as he is, he brought me this beautiful bear that said I love you. And the bear was holding this heart. You've seen that, that stuffed animal before the bear, with the heart holding the heart. I remember being in the hospital after the surgery and looking at that bear and saying, that's exactly what I feel like. I feel like I'm just holding my heart, holding my feelings in my hand. Not able to fully express them just yet, but holding my heart, holding everything together. I didn't like that feeling at all, y'all. I didn't like it and I wanted to say something. I wanted to talk about what was going on the inside, but I didn't know how to share it. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know how to say. I'm angry. I didn't know how to say I'm tired. I didn't know how to say. I'm frustrated. I'm hurting. I feel a little lonely. I didn't know how to express that at this time, but I'm thankful that I did get a chance to finally say those things and I'll talk to you a little bit about how I began to do that and how real healing began. Because at this moment, there was no healing happening. It was just, there was just treatment. We were servicing the wound. And in that moment, the wound is all that matters. If you have a wound that's bleeding profusely, while there may be lots of pain, the first thing you wanna do is stop the bleeding, because once you've lost too much blood, then you could closer and closer to having very few options. And at this point, we're just stopping the bleeding. But I had the surgery and I was in the hospital for about 10 days or more, I can't remember. No, 10 days. Yeah, 10. I was supposed to be in the hospital for four days, five days, but the surgery lasted at 17 hours. Unexpectedly, and. It was it was just necessary for me to stay a little longer to be watched and for them to tend to whatever needs I may have, whatever came up during the course of my immediate recovery. The 17 hour surgery's over. I'm in recovery. I'm in the hospital for the 10 days, and those were 10 very difficult days, and 10 is number of testing, and this certainly was a test for me. Once I left the hospital, I had to, of course, then recover from the surgery fully at home, in bed, tending to the wound, tending to the need. Dealing with the adjustment, transitioning from what I was feeling before to what I'm now feeling after the surgery, taking the necessary medication and putting on the bandages and whatever else that I was required to do. And there was a lot that I was required to do. But that was all over and when it was over, there was a relief. There was a sense of, oh my gosh, I made it through that. Thank you, Jesus. I made it. Thank God I made it through, but that wasn't the end. That's actually just how it starts. It's like the intro, right? It's the appetizer of the meal. And while it was a pretty hefty appetizer. I still had to prepare for the main course. The main course was what happens after? What does my life look like now? There's before the diagnosis, the treatment, and the recovery, and then there's that transition where your life is totally turned upside down and now. You have a new normal. Now what you used to do, you don't do anymore and you now have to shift and change and make some lifestyle changes sometimes, right? I had to stop hiding if I wanted to start healing. If you're wise, you decide, okay, I want to make sure that I protect this healing process by making better choices, by making the choices that are gonna support my healing, making choices that are going to keep me well. That happens for a long period of time and it never ends. So you spend the rest of your time, the rest of your life in healing mode because truthfully, we're all a work in progress. We might have healed from some things and we're still healing now from others. There's always something that we need to work on. There's always a healing that needs to take place. So that's the story. And then I realize that I have so much to share. I wanna help people who are going through. That diagnose stage, whether it's a diagnosis for some illness, a disease, or something terrible happened, a loss dealing with grief, dealing with emotional dis-ease, just dealing with life and the challenges that come with all of it, and how to navigate those experiences. Not so that you can perform for the world, not so that you can look good in the process, but so that you can do the work so that you can get better. The end goal here is to get better. That's the end goal. To get better, be better than you were yesterday, today. Be better than you were today, tomorrow, that's it. That's all we're doing here. So again, welcome to Health Healing and Hope. We're gonna talk about health overall, general health, mind, body, spirit,. Addressing our whole person, and we're gonna talk about healing, which is a process we're always working towards better. And then we're gonna talk about hope and how it interconnects those two things. Like in my example, I said I had to change my lifestyle. Oh yeah. I trust that I was going to get better. I know that I'm working towards healing, and healing is mine, but there are some steps I need to take. There's some actionable things that need to happen, and we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about hope. The Bible says faith is a substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen. The evidential faith is what manifests. So people like to say manifestation, right? We love the manifestation. We don't like the other part. There has to be a directive for our faith. We have to give it something we have to put in a code. It's like you have to put the code in the computer in order for something, for an output. The input is hope. The output is this, quote unquote manifestation. Say, I have faith. Faith in what? What do you have? Faith in? Faith in God. Okay. A reasonable trust based on who God is. Yeah. He is your hope. He is also the substance of your faith. So what we're gonna talk about is health, healing, and hope. I'm gonna be here every week to discuss that with you. We're gonna laugh. We might even cry a little bit, but we're definitely gonna laugh. We're gonna learn and we're gonna share, and we're gonna get better together. Every week I'll present a little opening, maybe an anecdote, and I'll present the theme and the title for the week, and then we'll share some stories of. People who are going through a healing process and what their journey looks like. We'll discuss that a little bit with them. We'll ask some questions and I'll give you opportunity to ask some questions too when we do our live, and then we'll have a summary of what we've. Gained from that conversation, what we glean from the wonderful conversation that we have, and I'll leave you with a reflection, something to think about till next week because this Health, healing and Hope podcast it's a conversation. It's a workbook. An audio workbook. I like that. An audio workbook? Yeah. We're doing the work here and I'll give you a reflection and an opportunity to just think on it. You have some time. Download our free reflection journal. You can get that for free when you click the link down below. And then I'll share some thoughts with you, Some things that you need to know, and then we'll do the same thing again next week. But my hope, my prayer is that our time together is well spent. And that the information that I share is helping you. Now, what I do and dedicate some time every week is not just for entertainment, but that it's equipping you, it's making you better. It's encouraging you, it's empowering you. It's inspiring you to be better. We're gonna take a hard look. We're gonna deal with some hard truths, y'all. You gonna talk about it, but I'm looking forward to spending some time with you every week Until we meet again, be well. Be strong, be you.