Episode 13 Shownotes - Rewriting Your Story

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You are listening to Best Life after Cancer, Episode 13.

Hey, my best lifers and welcome back! Hope this is finding you well and surviving the heat! In NJ, it has been over 95 every day. My littlest was in camp, and man, the poor guy came home red and looking like a bit of a wilted plant all week. It gave me a good excuse to stay inside and work on the next podcast. This week has been great - I had a chance to interact with some awesome people on a cancer survivor and caregiver group on Facebook. I was so happy to share what I have learned, and see again where people are struggling. It helps me to really tailor things to help my survivors to get faster and better results. It was so inspiring to hear patient’s stories, and watch them support and love each other. I am amazed to see the strength, resilience and courage of some of these people. And, I was reminded about how hard it is to see past the fear that comes after a cancer diagnosis. This is such a good example of what we were talking about in the second podcast, and also last week. Some people in the group think there is no way to live without being in fear, while other people are there deciding to live their lives in abundance and not worry unless there is something that comes up that they have to deal with. There is time to worry then! Even then, in truth, they aren’t worrying – they are researching and problem solving, big difference there for sure. Worrying doesn’t move you forward, but problem solving sure does! I have said this before, but want to keep saying it in different ways to help it sink in. Worry doesn’t prevent bad things from happening. Someone told me recently they had to worry because they had cancer that had spread. I asked if worrying was helping to treat the cancer, giving him more good time, or coming up with solutions. He told me no, it was not treating the cancer, no, it was taking away good time, and no, in actuality, it was preventing him from really making a plan and sticking to it in dealing with his disease. He was stuck in a what is the best option spiral, getting lots of opinions, on the internet constantly, and not moving forward with anything for fear of making the wrong decision. So, we discussed, the worry is really mucking up the works, isn’t it? In my medical opinion, the WORST decision right now is NO decision. That is the one thing that is guaranteed NOT to work, right? The lightbulb went on for him, and he decided he would try to give up worry and just be in the moment with his family, because, really he feels good now. He would pick the option that seems the best, and go all in on fighting this. So much more productive, for sure.

Last week, we spent a lot of time in being present in now. This week on the surface may seem very similar, but what I want to teach living in abundance. Not just today, but writing your story from a place of abundance in your past, and the expectation of abundance in your future. These two concepts together, from staying in now in terms of dealing with worry, and creating a life story of abundance work well together, and both techniques are amazing at increasing our Life Joy Metric. I did an internet search, and I think maybe this is a term I have created for you guys. But, this is how I measure my life. Not in financial success, status, or other tangible things. In a Life Joy Metric. This is how much joy is there in my life overall? How much on a daily basis? How focused am I on creating more in my future? This whole month, we have worked on this, from finding ways to create more joy in each week from small things, to letting go of the worry that saps joy last week, to creating a story of abundance and joy and outlining a future with expectations of joy to come. This writing our past story is one of my favorite things. I am a huge believer of seeing what we have created in our lives, both good and bad, with our thoughts and beliefs, and then deciding what we want to create moving forward. I know sometimes people think I have a life that seems so easy, but the truth is, every life has its challenges and its joys, and I have worked really hard for many years to create this life. This life is the result of conscious thoughts as to how and where to spend my time and energy to create the greatest joy possible. I will be the first to admit, thought, I have also manifested some not so great things over the years – at one point, I weighed almost 200 pounds, I had a broken relationship with my biological mother and more. So today, I am going to tell you quickly about a few of the things I created through purposeful generation of good thoughts, and one of the things I created by NOT paying attention to my thoughts. Then, I will go through how to do this process for yourself – how to assess what you have created, good or bad, and whether you want to continue it.

So – the first thing people see when they look at my life from the outside is often my family. I have 4 boys, and they are funny and smart and handsome, at least to my eye. But what some people don’t know is that the first three are the result of years of infertility treatments. It took me almost 4 years of treatment to have my first. Months of bloodwork, invasive ultrasounds, failed procedures, and more. It was painful, and made me feel like crap a lot of the time. But after every failed cycle, I bought an item of maternity clothes. It was a thought that eventually this treatment would work, turned into something I could see and touch, affirming that at some point I was going to need and use them. For everyone who has had fertility treaments, they know every failed cycle comes with huge hormone swings. For me, a miscarriage along the way, a year into the fertility treatments brought more despression, but my thought was that if I could stick it out, stay with the course, eventually I would have a child. This thought allowed me to keep plugging along, even though my body really wanted me to take a break. I did get pregnant, but with a baby with an abnormal umbilical cord and a heart defect. We were told he might have a genetic problem like Downs, and he definitely would need open heart surgery soon after birth. We were so grateful that his genes were normal and the thought we had in that moment was that hearts can be fixed, but genes currently can’t. We felt we got everything we could hope for – if there was a problem, it was one we could fix. He was born and did need open heart surgery at 6 weeks old. Again, we got to pick our thoughts. The ones that helped in that time – we are so blessed that we live now, and not 30 years ago, when this was likely a death sentence for an infant. We are so lucky that we are both medical, and can understand this, that the ICU is not so scary and overwhelming. I went on to have 2 more high risk pregnancies, with a trimester of daily bleeding with the twins, and a clotting problem with the last that could have been life threatening. But, what I took from that journey is not that it was so hard, and so unfair that we never got an easy, fun pregnancy. I didn’t write my story telling myself it was an awful time in our lives. I wrote my story to be that we were so blessed to be able to create the family of our dreams. I look back and know, if I hadn’t found a way to keep going through the years of fertility treatments, our life would be so different, and I am proud that I was able to keep going even though it was scary, sad and uncomfortable. I truly believe my thoughts manifested my four kids, because without the thoughts FIRST, the fertility treatments would not have been given the chance to work.

I see such a parallel to this in cancer care, even though having a cancer is harder, scarier, more painful, more uncomfortable, and doesn’t come with a baby at the end. To get through treatment, you have to have a thought convincing yourself it is going to work, creating a vision of the future that helps you get through the toughest times, and then after treatment, choosing a thought that allows you to have pride in how you dealt with one of the toughest times in your life. You also have the opportunity to create a story moving forward that your cancer has paved the way for a life of even more abundance. Some of the happiest patients I have are the ones who after tell me that having cancer just let them let go of all the small stuff that detracted from their daily happiness before. They no longer care if the house is perfect before they go for a swim with their kids. They no longer need a clean refrigerator to feel that they can sit and enjoy a cup of coffee without guilt. They know that working more efficiently and setting boundaries with their job allows them to make time for what REALLY matters in life, and they get home for dinner every night with their family. This is so good. And it starts with writing your story of your past, and your future, creating a story for yourself that helps you see things in the best light. I am going to illustrate this for you quickly in two ways – the story I could tell and the one I DO tell. Then, you will see how you can write your past story, and create your future story to give you a sense of living your best life. Keep in mind, both of these are absolutely true, but what story gives me the best experience of my life to date?

Ok – so I am going to do how I could see my life first. During college, one of my best friends died of ovarian cancer. It sucked so much joy out of my college experience. I got into medical school, but not my first choice school. I got really sick during the first semester, and failed a test, and spent the rest of the first year living in terror that I would have to repeat the year. I got into a rad onc residency, but was the only woman in the program at the time, and it was not a great situation. I had to commute an hour each way because my husband was doing his residency in a different city, so we lived in between, and it was so much harder for me than the other residents. I also started infertility treatments during residency. It made things even harder. I got a job, but still couldn’t get pregnant. There was no joy in the whole process, all it was was misery and stress. When I did finally get pregnant, the whole pregnancy was stressful, bc the baby had a heart problem. He needed surgery and we had to see him on a ventilator and stuck with tubes and catheters. I went on to have 2 more high risk pregnancies with lots of stress, testing, misery and discomfort. This is similar to the story so many people tell themselves – how bad their life has been. This does not serve us. There is no gratefulness, no sense of abundance, no sense that I am strong, and resourceful and amazing. I don’t like that person, and I bet no one else would either.

The story I do tell is this. I was one of the lucky people who knew in college exactly what they wanted to do. I KNEW I wanted to go to medical school. In my first year of college, my friend Kolleen was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at 19 years old. She ended up dying from her disease. It was a journey that was heartbreaking, but taught me what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to give other people a cure from cancer AND hope and love. I was not just going to medical school, I was going to be an oncologist, and take that loss and turn it into something for all the patients I treated through the years. In all honesty, if you are my patient, and I spent time with you, gave you hope, comfort and love along with radiation, you owe it to a 19 year old girl who died of her cancer. I got into medical school in the city I wanted to stay in. How great is that? Along the way, there were some bumps in the road, which comes with doing something really hard. During my first semester, I was really sick with a high fever and ear infection that led to a perforated ear drum during my first midterms. Unfortunately, I failed my first anatomy exam during that time. They told me it was very unlikely that I could possibly come back from that, and I likely would have to repeat my first year. I went on to prove them wrong, getting the second highest grade in the class on the final, beaten only by my study partner! I was so proud of my hard work in that moment, and it really reinforced that I can create whatever I really put my mind to, if I am just willing to work hard enough. I got a residency in Philadelphia, and my soon to be husband matched the following year at a program in New Brunswick, NJ, about an hour away. We got married, and were so lucky to have us match in cities close enough together that we could live together during residency. There was even a train I could take to work, so I could study or rest every day, instead of fighting traffic. I was the first woman in the program in many years, and I was proud to see that I could hold my own in the group, and pave the way for more female residents as years went by. That lesson from my first year in medical school really helped here – I knew I could do anything if I just worked hard enough, and I knew that the only thing that could stop me is my lack of belief. My husband and I wanted to start a family, and even though that was challenging, we were in a place with good doctors who could help us when we realized we would need fertility treatments. The fertility treatments were another place I realized that sometimes you just have to accept discomfort to get what you really want in life. It was so worth it. We needed IVF with ICSI ultimately, which is about as high tech as it gets, but the miracle of our journey – they let us see the embryos under the microscope. I saw our child when he was only 16 cells. Our first baby had a heart defect and needed open heart surgery, but we live close to CHOP and were able to get world class care. I was so grateful, looking at all of the other patients in the ICU that day, looking so scared, that the lights and alarms and machines were familiar to us. I didn’t need a nurse to tell me an alarm was no problem, and could interpret the data for myself. It was amazing to see our baby after surgery – even though he was on a ventilator, with tons of catheters, wires, and tubes sticking out of him, his lips were pink. Before the surgery, they were always a bit blue. We got a smile out of thinking he looked like they put lipstick on him, even though the day was stressful. I went on to have two other high risk pregnancies, but my high risk team was AMAZING and discovered that I had a clotting problem. I am certain that putting me on blood thinners saved my life in my last pregnancy, and I know how very lucky I am that all 4 children survived that issue as well. It is really miraculous. This is my story. This is my life. I am strong, resourceful, resilient, blessed, hardworking, and more. I like this person. I respect her.

Today, you are going to look at the story you have written. Do you like yourself in the story? Maybe I should say that even stronger – do you love and respect yourself in your story? If you don’t, it is in your power to brainstorm and create a story where you DO love and respect yourself. Do you like your story itself? Does it seem like a story full of blessing? If not, rewrite it. In the times of hardship, where you resourceful, strong, smart, or loved and supported by everyone you knew? Where in life where you lucky? Where did you work hard? What are you proud of? Where were there blessings that you might not be appreciating? How were the hard times preparing you, or making you stronger? I actually think this is so powerful to actually write out, and even redo it over the years. I did mine about 18 months ago, and thought it was the most amazing, powerful story then. But I redid it again, after living into that story and really getting to believe it. When I went back, now that I fully believed my first rewritten one, I was able to tweak it and make it even better, and I am now working on living into that one, and seeing it as my reality. I will tell you, my first attempt didn’t see how failing the exam gave me strength and confidence later in life. When you start telling yourself the old story, say NO – that is not my story, and remind yourself what your real story is.

What I have written for myself now is that I have manifested everything I have in my life, and I found 10 things that I really feel that I worked for and created that I wanted. These include my career, my family, a peaceful life focused on gratitude, a life lived with adventure and travel. I showed how I created them with my thoughts. I also wrote up how I UNINTENTIONALLY manifested a weight problem with my thoughts. I didn’t believe it for many years, because I thought I was just happy, but the truth is I felt happy because I was smashing down my negative feelings with food and alcohol. I had a thought that I didn’t deserve to feel bad ever when talking to my patients, because I was healthy, my spouse and kids were healthy. I didn’t have cancer. I felt like I owed it to the patients to be positive, happy, and I told myself if we were healthy, we had nothing to complain about. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to find there were negative feelings under all that, right? When it came to food or alcohol, I had thoughts of “I deserve this”, “today was hard” or “today was sad”. I self medicated with bread and chocolate. I got up to almost 200 pounds. I created that with my thoughts. I manifested my sadness in a layer of fat over my body, numbed myself to my pain, and added actually more misery to my life as I struggled with my weight, body image and things like fatigue and joint pain from hauling that body around. I joined a life coaching group for female physicians, and realized I could create what I wanted with my body just like I had created what I want for my life. It is just changing my thoughts there as well. If you are struggling with weight, by the way, my first life coach’s podcast is amazing – Weight Loss for Busy Physicians with Dr. Katrina Ubell. Geared for doctors, but totally applicable for all people. Check it out if weight is an issue – I will touch on it from time to time, but will not do the deep dive Katrina does.

So – this week, look for what you are creating with your thoughts, both good and bad. If it is an overweight body, look for what thoughts are creating it. If it is a life of worry, look for what is creating that as well. We all have the opportunity to create what we want. If you want to live without worry, with a life of abundance, you have it in your power to create it with your story. Once you create a life of abundance in your past, you can move forward and brainstorm how you want to create this in your future. I am working on manifesting a new chapter where I help thousands of people, not hundreds. Where I free myself from my weight struggles permanently. Where I create a life of joy, with small moments daily, and big swaths of joy that gleam like beacons when I look back at my life from things like epic travel and true connection with family and friends. I don’t just hope for it. I plan for it. I figure out what I need to do to get it. For sure, we will talk more about that at some point in the future, but right now, see what you have created, and use that knowledge to plan what you want to create. Ok, everyone, have a great day, great week, stay cool and create joy! I’ll talk with you soon!